Django REST Custom Errors

Question

I’m trying to create a custom error response from the REST Django framework.

I’ve included the following in my views.py,

from rest_framework.views import exception_handler

def custom_exception_handler(exc):
    """
    Custom exception handler for Django Rest Framework that adds
    the `status_code` to the response and renames the `detail` key to `error`.
    """
    response = exception_handler(exc)

    if response is not None:
        response.data['status_code'] = response.status_code
        response.data['error'] = response.data['detail']
        response.data['detail'] = "CUSTOM ERROR"

    return response

And also added the following to settings.py.

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
              'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': (
                  'rest_framework.permissions.AllowAny',
              ),
              'EXCEPTION_HANDLER': 'project.input.utils.custom_exception_handler'
        }

Am I missing something as I don’t get the expected response. i.e a custom error message in the 400 API response.

Thanks,

Answer 1

As Bibhas said, with custom exception handlers, you only can return own defined errors when an exception is called. If you want to return a custom response error without exceptions being triggered, you need to return it in the view itself. For example:

    return Response({'detail' : "Invalid arguments", 'args' : ['arg1', 'arg2']}, 
                     status = status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)