Django TemplateHTMLRenderer - Rendering a HTML view

Question

I'm trying to render some objects from my model to HTML. I initially thought this was going to be straightforward (and it likely is) but I'm coming up against numerous errors.

In this project I have built some API views that work fine (HintsListApiView and HintsRudView work). But I'd ideally like to use the API to produce a regular - read only HTML page that I can then style as I wish - my HTMLAPIView. I'm trying to use TemplateHTMLRenderer, but am coming up against errors. All I want is to get the text attribute to show up in HTML. The actual texts are just a sentence long each. These are my files:

models.py:

from django.db import models
from rest_framework.reverse import reverse as api_reverse

class Hints(models.Model):

    text = models.TextField(max_length=255)
    author = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    timestamp = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)


    def __str__(self):
        return str(self.text)

    def timestamp_pretty(self):
        return self.timestamp.strftime('%b %d %Y')

    def get_api_url(self, request=None):
        return api_reverse("api-hints1:hints-rud", kwargs={'pk': self.pk}, request=request)

views.py:

class HTMLAPIView(generics.RetrieveAPIView):
    lookup_field = 'pk'
    serializer_class = HTMLSerializer
    renderer_classes = (TemplateHTMLRenderer,)

    def get_queryset(self):
        queryset = Hints.objects.value('text')
        return Response({'queryset': queryset}, template_name='base.html') 



class HintsListApiView(mixins.CreateModelMixin, generics.ListAPIView):

    lookup_field = 'pk'
    serializer_class = HintsSerializer

    def get_queryset(self):
        qs = Hints.objects.all()
        query = self.request.GET.get("q")
        if query is not None:
            qs = qs.filter(
                Q(text__icontains=query)|
                Q(author__icontains=query)
                ).distinct()
        return qs

    def post(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        return self.create(request, *args, **kwargs)

    def get_serializer_context(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return {"request": self.request}



class HintsRudView(generics.RetrieveUpdateDestroyAPIView):

    lookup_field = 'pk'
    serializer_class = HintsSerializer

    def get_queryset(self):
        return Hints.objects.all()

    def get_serializer_context(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return {"request": self.request}

serializers.py:

class HintsSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    url = serializers.SerializerMethodField(read_only=True)

    class Meta:
        model = Hints
        fields = [
            'url',
            'id', 
            'text', 
            'author', 
            'timestamp_pretty'
            ]

        read_only_fields = ['timestamp_pretty', 'id']

    def get_url(self, obj):
        request = self.context.get("request")
        return obj.get_api_url(request=request)


class HTMLSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    class Meta:
        model = Hints
        fields = [ 
        'text', 
        ]

        read_only_fields = ['text',]

root urls.py:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.conf.urls import url, include
from rest_framework import routers, serializers, viewsets

urlpatterns = [
    url('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    url(r'^api/hints/', include(('hints1.api.urls', 'api'), namespace='api-hints1')),
    url(r'^api-auth/', include('rest_framework.urls')),
]

urls.py:

from .views import HintsRudView, HintsListApiView, HTMLAPIView
from . import views
from django.contrib import admin
from django.conf.urls import url, include
from rest_framework import routers, serializers, viewsets

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^(?P<pk>\d+)$', HintsRudView.as_view(), name='hints-rud'),
    url(r'^$', HintsListApiView.as_view(), name='hints-list'),
    url(r'^html/', HTMLAPIView.as_view(), name='html' )    
]

The errors I've faced were varied, currently I'm encountering AttributeError at /api/hints/html/

Manager object has no attribute 'value'.

I've tried with and without a serializer (because in the documentation it mentions TemplateHTMLRenderer doesn't need one). I think the problem lies within the view.py and the get_queryset function. I've tried various approaches but will get other errors like

TypeError context must be a dict rather than QuerySet.

Any help that can be provided will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Answer 1

So I managed to do what I wanted. But to be honest I'm not completely sure why it worked, so if anyone can provide clarification, please do.

I changed my HTMLAPIView in views.py to a Viewset:

class HTMLAPIView(viewsets.ViewSet):
    renderer_classes = [TemplateHTMLRenderer]
    template_name = 'base.html'
    serializer_class = HTMLSerializer


    def list(self, request):
        queryset = Hints.objects.order_by('pk')        
        return Response({'queryset': queryset}) 

I then got an error in my urls.py but was able to fix that by including the dictionary portion in the .as_view()

url(r'^html/', HTMLAPIView.as_view({'get': 'list'}), name='html' )

The reason why I'm not sure why this worked is that it returns my text attribute from my model as I wanted but I don't see where I specified that that's the correct attribute. Is it just because it is the first one?

I also tried commenting out the serializer and it still worked fine, so I concluded that wasn't the reason for the results.