Is it a good practice to use serializer as query parameters validators?

Question

Serializer would not be used for its intended purpose of creating some django model but it would be used for query parameters validation, creation of filtering query to elasticsearch, swagger documentation describing API.

from rest_framework import views, serializers, fields
from rest_framework.response import Response


class TestQueryParams(serializers.Serializer):
    id = fields.IntegerField(min_value=0)
    date = fields.DateField(format='%Y%m%d')


class TestView(views.APIView):
    def get(self, request):
        qp = TestQueryParams(data=request.query_params)
        qp.is_valid(raise_exception=True)
        # parameters would not be used to create some model
        # but they would be used to get data
        return Response({'some': 'data'})

Answer 1

Definitely a good practice, since the serializer will automatically validate the fields, and raise the right exception if required.

The alternative is to either manually define these validations in the view, or worse - have your APIs return 500 server errors whenever an incorrect input is sent.