Django Rest Framework Send Data to View Without Serializer

Question

I have a Magic model in my application. I need the user who is attached to this model to go to their email address to verify something before they can access the information. This should happen over a RESTful API. The problem is, the user should not necessarily be logged in to access this feature (for design decisions I had no control over).

I have implemented the logic for generating the necessary information and sending the email (only if such an email is registered), authentication once the emailed information is accessed, etc.

My question: How do I implement a view that takes a user email in the body (or url)?

Approach 1: create a url /magic_api/v1/tdbverification/(?P<email>[\w.@]+)/ and extract the email address and send the email.

Problem with 1: I cannot seem to extract the email and I need to return a json object without having a serializer

Approach 2: Create a view that takes body: {"email": "<[email protected]>"}

Problem with 2: This requires a serializer without a model (as this view is just for sending the email, it does not change model objects). I tried working with a serializers.Serializer class but could not figure out how to incorporate the email sending logic.

Any help with this will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Why you always need a serializer! You can write a view without using a serializer. Example

from rest_framework.views import APIView
from rest_framework.response import Response

class Test(APIView):
    def post(self, request):
        email = request.data['email']
        ...  your logic ...
        return Response(...)