Hipo DRF Exceptions

A Django app for returning consistent, verbose and easy to parse error messages on Django Rest Framework backends.

Parsing error messages generated by DRF is a bit of pain for client developers. They need to try-catch different possible error formats. When you add errors raised at the business logic level, the error parsing becomes even more difficult.

This package unifies the output format of DRF in the "Hipo Error Protocol".

No more "An error occured." errors.

This package also provides the "fallback message", a text string that always contains a human readable error summary. This way, client developers can always fallback and show this message when the client receives an error that is not handled.

Sounds cool! Can client devs just use this field all the time?

In our past experience, we noticed that some lazy client developers tend to use this message and avoid writing any code to parse the error bundle. However, the message in this field is automatically generated and may not always be suitable for end users. In order to make clear that this is a fallback message, we named this field "fallback_message"

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
• Client SDKs
• Support
• Contributing

Installation

You can get stable version of Hipo Excepitons by using pip, pipenv or poetry:

pip install hipo-drf-exceptions

Usage

Handler

You will need to set EXCEPTION_HANDLER of the REST_FRAMEWORK setting of your Django project settings.py file.

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    ..
    'EXCEPTION_HANDLER': 'hipo_drf_exceptions.handler',
}

Example Error Responses

Field Error

You can make validations on model level and raise ValidationError when it is required.

from django.core.exceptions import ValidationError

class Invitation(models.Model):
    email = models.EmailField(unique=True)

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if User.objects.filter(email=self.email).exists():
            raise ValidationError({"email": _("Email is already registered.")})
            
        super().save(*args, **kwargs)

If the view or serializer encounters with the ValidationError, The response will be like:

{
    "type": "ValidationError",
    "detail": {
        "email": [
            "Email is already registered."
        ]
    },
    "fallback_message": "Email is already registered."
}

Non Field Error

Implement your own error classes.

from hipo_drf_exceptions import BaseAPIException

class ProfileCredentialError(BaseAPIException):
    default_detail = _('Profile credentials are not correct.')

Raise error when it is required.

class AuthenticationView(GenericAPIView):

    def post(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        ..
        if not profile.check_password(password):
            raise ProfileCredentialError()
        ..

The response will be like:

{
    "type": "ProfileCredentialError",
    "detail": {
        "non_field_errors": [
            "Profile credentials are not correct."
        ]
    },
    "fallback_message": "Profile credentials are not correct."
}

Settings

You can set default key for Django's non field errors key (it is "__all__") by adding this to your Django settings:

HIPO_DRF_EXCEPTIONS_SETTINGS = {
    "DJANGO_NON_FIELD_ERRORS_KEY": "field_free_errors"  # by default it's "non_field_errors" to be consistent with DRF.
}

Testing

Install dependencies via poetry.

poetry install

Run tests.

pytest test_project

Client SDKs

We have SDKs for client side.

• hipo-exceptions-js is for JS.
• hipo-exceptions-android is for Android.

Support

Please open an issue for support.

Contributing

Please contribute using Github Flow. Create a branch, add commits, and open a pull request.