Supporting additional methods for a viewset's list route

[rvinzent]

I have a normal viewset that supports the standard actions

GET /api/view/ -> list
GET /api/view/<id>/ -> retrieve
POST /api/view/ -> create
PATCH /api/view/<id>/ -> partial_update
etc.

I would like to add an additional action on the viewset:
PATCH /api/view/ -> bulk_update

So it seems like you should just be able to define a new action on the viewset. I don't want to add any elements to the route, I only want to add an additional method to the list route.

@action(detail=False, methods=["PATCH"], url_path="")
def bulk_update(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
    ...

Unfortunately this is not supported because the action implementation uses the method name as a default if url_path is any falsey value.

...
 func.url_path = url_path if url_path else func.__name__
...

Is there a good way to do this using an action on the ViewSet? I am really struggling to even find a work around for this.

[adamckay]

Hi @rvinzent, did you manage to solve this? I'm looking to achieve the same now.

[rvinzent]

@adamckay we ended up going with a bit of a work around. Our use case is a bulk update endpoint at something like PATCH /v1/list-resource

We have the normal viewset class like

class SomeResourceViewSet(viewsets.ViewSet):
    ...
    # note: do NOT add the @action decorator
    def bulk_update(self, request): ...

Apparently the ViewSet.as_view method allows passing in a dict of action names to method handlers, so we ended up generating a custom view from the viewset like

fixed_resource_list_view = SomeResourceViewSet.as_view(
    {
        "get": "list",
        "post": "create",
        "patch": "bulk_update",
    }
)

Then assign this view it as the first item in urlpatterns to override the default DRF behavior.

router = SimpleRouter()
router.register("resource", SomeResourceViewSet, basename="resource")

urlpatterns = [
    # patched routes, see patched view above; this item MUST come first
    path("v1/resource", fixed_resource_list_view, name="resource-list"),
    # now we can include the other regular views generated by the DRF router
    path("v1", include(router.urls)),
]

Maybe there's some kind of work around to override the views generated by the SimpleRouter class, but this one seems to work ok so we didn't bother. Hope this helps!

[adamckay]

Awesome, thanks for the advice!