Using custom query to return JSON in Django Rest Framework

Question

I started to work with Django rest and I want to know:

Can I make a View or something else to make a custom query and return a JSON?

Answer 1

Yes. Just execute any query you want, convert the data to a dictionary, and return it using a standard response.

There is no need for a special JsonResponse type of class. You can specify the default renderer in the DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES settings of DRF.

class MyView(views.APIView):
    def get(self, request):
        data = execute_to_dict(
             "SELECT a, b FROM x WHERE y = %s AND z = %s"
             ["yvalue", 73]
        )
        return Response({
            'count': len(data),
            'results': data
        })


def execute_to_dict(query, params=None):
    with connection.cursor() as c:
        c.execute(query, params or [])
        names = [col[0] for col in c.description]
        return [dict(list(zip(names, values))) for values in c.fetchall()]

This will output something like:

{ 
    "count": 1, 
    "results": [
        { 
            "a": "value for a", 
            "b": "to be"
        }, 
        { 
            "a": "row 2!", 
            "b": "or not 2 be"
        }
    ]
}