CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythondjangoformsvalidationdjango-rest-framework
AnotherHowie
AnotherHowie

Reputation: 822

Validating a Django model field based on another field's value?

I have a Django app with models accessible by both Django REST Framework and a regular form interface. The form interface has some validation checks before saving changes to the model, but not using any special Django framework, just a simple local change in the view.

I'd like to apply the same validation to forms and REST calls, so I want to move my validation into the model. I can see how to do that for simple cases using the validators field of the Field, but in one case I have a name/type/value model where the acceptable values for 'value' change depending on which type is selected. The validator doesn't get sent any information about the model that the field is in, so it doesn't have access to other fields.

How can I perform this validation, without having essentially the same code in a serializer for DRF and my POST view for the form?

Upvotes: 21

Views: 19119

Answers (3)

Sagar Adhikari
Sagar Adhikari

Reputation: 1382

I dug around codebase of drf a little bit. You can get values of all fields using following approach. Doing so, you can throw serialization error as {'my_field':'error message} instead of {'non_field_error':'error message'}.

def validate_myfield(self, value):
   data = self.get_initial() # data for all the fields
   #do your validation

However, if you wish to do it for ListSerializer, i.e for serializer = serializer_class(many=True), this won't work. You will get list of empty values. In that scenario, you could write your validations in def validate function and to avoid non_field_errors in your serialization error, you can raise ValidationError with error message as a dictionary instead of string.

def validate(self, data):
    # do your validation
    raise serializers.ValidationError({"your_field": "error_message"})

Upvotes: 15

user1110718
user1110718

Reputation: 217

You can use the required package for your cross-field validation. It allows you to express your validation rules declaratively in python. You would have something like this with DRF:

class MySerializer(serializers.Serializer):

    REQUIREMENTS = (
        Requires("end_date", "start_date") +
        Requires("end_date", R("end_date") > R("start_date")) + 
        Requires("end_date", R("end_date") < today.date() + one_year) + 
        Requires("start_date", R("start_date") < today.date() + one_year)
     )

    start_date = serializers.DateField(required=False, null=True, blank=True)
    end_date = serializers.DateField(required=False, null=True, blank=True)

    def validate(self, data):
        self.REQUIREMENTS.validate(data)  # handle validation error

You could put the REQUIREMENTS on your Model and have both your DRF and Django Form validate your data using it.

Here is a blog post explaining more

Upvotes: 3

wim
wim

Reputation: 362478

The validation per-field doesn't get sent any information about other fields, when it is defined like this:

def validate_myfield(self, value):
    ...

However, if you have a method defined like this:

def validate(self, data):
    ...

Then you get all the data in a dict, and you can do cross-field validation.

Upvotes: 8

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