How to catch API call errors in python/Django?

Question

I have a Django app and a workflow like this in my views.py: my front end makes a call to my back end which uses the params received from front end to make an API call to an external API. I map the response from the external API to my serializer and check if the serializer is valid before saving the response to database. What I need help with is how to properly check for the responses from the external API and catch any errors getting from there? Can I just use try/except? At the moment I don't know about their exact responses but that is something I can clarify later.

This is my class from views.py:

    class Example(generics.ListCreateAPIView):
        permission_classes = (AllowAny,)
        serializer_class = ExampleSerializer
    
        def post(self, request, format=None):
            pin = request.data['pin']
            id = str(uuid.uuid4())
            post_obj = {'pin': pin, 'id': id}
            data = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(post_obj))
            json_result = data.json()
            serializer = ExampleSerializer(data=json_result['data'])
            if serializer.is_valid():
                serializer.save()
                return Response(serializer.data, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)
            return Response(serializer.errors, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

Answer 1

with request you can use the built-in provided raise_for_status:

from requests.exceptions import HTTPError

with requests.Session() as api:
    response = api.post(url, data=json.dumps(post_obj))
    try:
        api.raise_for_status()
    except HTTPError as e:
        return Response(
            {"api": "Cannot load API response"}, 
            status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST
        )
json_result = response.json()

This will raise an HTTPError if the result is not valid, you just add you'r response and it will works