Django REST Framework: slow browsable UI because of large related table

Question

I have a model in my API that has a foreign key to a table with tens of thousands of records. When I browse to that model's detail page in the browsable UI, the page load takes forever because it is trying to populate the foreign key dropdown with tens of thousands of entries for the HTML form for the PUT command.

Is there anyway to work around this? I think my best solution would be to have the browsable UI not show this field and thus prevent the slow load. People can still update the field by an actual PUT api request directly.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Take a look at using an autocomplete widget, or drop down to using a dumb textfield widget.

Autocompletion docs here: http://www.django-rest-framework.org/topics/browsable-api/#autocomplete

Answer 2

Note that you can disable the HTML form and keep the raw data json entry with:

class BrowsableAPIRendererWithoutForms(BrowsableAPIRenderer):
    """Renders the browsable api, but excludes the forms."""
    def get_rendered_html_form(self, data, view, method, request):
        return None

and in settings.py:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.renderers.JSONRenderer',
        'application.api.renderers.BrowsableAPIRendererWithoutForms',
    ),
}

this will speed things up and you can still post from from the browsable ui.