Django Rest Framework API Client Custom Header

Question

I am trying to use bulk update from drf-extensions. To make it work, there is a safeguard requiring the header "X-BULK-OPERATION": 'true'. I can get the application working using curl or my angular app, but in my tests I am trying to use rest_framework.test.APIClient to send the partial_update request, but every time I get a 400 response, and when debugging the request, I am getting

ipdb> response.data
{'detail': "Header 'X-BULK-OPERATION' should be provided for bulk operation."}

This is the request I am trying to use in my test

    response = self.client.patch(
        '/api/v1/db_items/?active=True',
        json.dumps(data),
        content_type='application/json',
        **{X-BULK-OPERATION: 'true'}
    )

Is there a way to set headers on an APIClient request?

I've even tried changing the header name and setting it in credentials with

self.client.credentials(HTTP_BULK_OPERATION='true')

but I get the same error every single time

Answer 1

The answer is extremely poorly documented, but it seems django does its own parsing of the headers passed in. I successfully did this by changing my code to be

response = self.client.patch(
    "/api/v1/db_items/?active=True",
    json.dumps(data),
    content_type="application/json",
    HTTP_X_BULK_OPERATION="true",
)

Note the HTTP_ prefix. This is recognized by the Django client and translated to a HTTP header with the key X-BULK-OPERATION and the value "true"