Django Rest Framework DELETE returns no content in the body

Question

I am using Django Rest Framework and I am making a DELETE request. As opposed to POST, PUT, PATCH, which all return the state of the object post creation/modification, delete does not return anything in the body (just the 204 code).

Having this information would be helpful when trying to tie responses back to their original requests. In particular https://github.com/agraboso/redux-api-middleware does a bad job at telling me what succeeded and what errored)

Is there a way to force DRF to add information about what was deleted in the body of the response?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Sure thing. In your view, you'll have to override destroy. Default implementation -by the time of writing this answer- is:

def destroy(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
    instance = self.get_object()
    self.perform_destroy(instance)
    return Response(status=status.HTTP_204_NO_CONTENT)

Answer 2

Complementing @Linovia's otherwise complete answer with actionable code.

In the ViewSet, adding the following will help

class WhateverYourModelIsViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    def destroy(self, *args, **kwargs):
        serializer = self.get_serializer(self.get_object())
        super().destroy(*args, **kwargs)
        return response.Response(serializer.data, status=status.HTTP_200_OK)

Few things to be aware of:

• Returning 204 code will actually drop the data, you have to return something else
• You need to extract the data from the serializer before you call destroy

Edit:

Since I first posted my answer, I found myself in need to do the above quite often. A more scalable solution:

class DestroyWithPayloadMixin(object):
     def destroy(self, *args, **kwargs):
         serializer = self.get_serializer(self.get_object())
         super().destroy(*args, **kwargs)
         return response.Response(serializer.data, status=status.HTTP_200_OK)

class WhateverYourModelIsViewSet(DestroyWithPayloadMixin, viewsets.ModelViewSet):
   # Your implementation 
   pass