DRF - Giving feedback to developer regarding bad inputs using django-filters

Question

I'm developing a REST API with django rest framework but I'm not finding a way of validating the inputs from the request with django-filters.

For example, say I have the model:

class Event(models.Model):
    timestamp = models.DateTimeField(help_text="Time it was created")
    is_important = models.BooleanField(help_text="If the event is important")

And I have the filter:

class EventFilter(filters.FilterSet):
    important = filters.BooleanFilter(name='is_important')
    since = filters.IsoDateTimeFilter(name='timestamp', lookup_type='gt')

    class Meta:
        model = Event

If, in my request, I insert a bad date like {url}/?since=2016-02-31T00:00Z or {url}/?since=yesterday, instead of receiving feedback about what is wrong with the request, the API will just returns a list without any results. This doesn't indicate that the developer made a bad request, it could just mean that there are no events under those terms.

The inverse happens with booleans, if in my request I send {url}/?is_important=maybe, it will return all the results without any filtering.

So, my question is: Does DRF have a way of validating these kind of inputs and return a meaningful response to the developer? Thank you.

Answer 1

django-filter has a strict attribute which controls the handling of validation errors.

import django_filters as filters
from django_filters.filterset import STRICTNESS

class EventFilter(filters.FilterSet):
    important = filters.BooleanFilter(name='is_important')
    since = filters.IsoDateTimeFilter(name='timestamp', lookup_type='gt')

    strict = STRICTNESS.RAISE_VALIDATION_ERROR

    class Meta:
        model = Event