setting the fields description if you are using function based views

[Dean-Christian-Armada]

How do I set the field descriptions in views.py on function based views?

This is my syntax:
@api_view(['GET', 'POST'])
def api_section(request):
"""
GET request gets the section and its details..... POST request, adds a new section
"""
if request.method == 'GET':
sections = Section.objects.all()
serializer = SectionSerializer(sections, many=True)
return Response(serializer.data)

elif request.method == 'POST':
    serializer = SectionSerializer(data=request.data)
    if serializer.is_valid():
        serializer.save()
        serializer_data = serializer.data
        del serializer_data['id']
        return Response(serializer_data, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)
    else:
        return Response(serializer.errors, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

Field descriptions seems to work smoothly by declaring a serializer_class variable in class-based views that inherits APIView like this one:

class ObtainAuthToken(APIView):
throttle_classes = ()
permission_classes = ()
parser_classes = (parsers.FormParser, parsers.MultiPartParser, parsers.JSONParser,)
renderer_classes = (renderers.JSONRenderer,)
serializer_class = AuthTokenSerializer

def post(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
    serializer = self.serializer_class(data=request.data)
    serializer.is_valid(raise_exception=True)
    user = serializer.validated_data['user']
    token, created = Token.objects.get_or_create(user=user)
    return Response({'token': token.key})

[jsangilve]

@Dean-Christian-Armada Did you solve this?

[Dean-Christian-Armada]

Actually no, I switched to class-based views

[jsangilve]

Ok. I imagine as there is not a serializers_class decorator, neither a property that can be extracted from function based views, it's not possible get the fields description

[Dean-Christian-Armada]

Exactly, besides I found out that the class-based view is much better

[niscp]

I am working with the DRF and got struck at this point. I am using fuction based views , and I am not getting the details of input parameters in API doc page. Please help on this one , if someone came across it.

[EssaAlshammri]

@niscp have you found a solution ?

[dmussaku]

So, if you are using a decorator like @api_view, the pattern.callback in rest_framework_docs.api_endpoint.py will not be api_section as you might suspect. But the callable api_view which apparently doesn't contain a docstring.

So there is a way to get a docstring out of api_view function however. It is written here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1782843/python-decorator-handling-docstrings

Basically you need to rewrite api_view in that way that it will contain a decorator functools.wraps() which will update the attrs of the decorator.
like so:

from functools import wraps

def decorator(f):
    @wraps(f)
    def _decorator():
        print 'decorator active'
        f()
    return _decorator

@decorator
def foo():
    '''the magic foo function'''
    print 'this is function foo'

help(foo)