Adding pagination to viewsets

[paulov59]

At the moment, it is not possible to use response pagination with ViewSets, and it is necessary to inherit GenericAPIView. However, the concept of ViewSets is to create only what is necessary and inheriting another class, receiving other methods that may be unnecessary in this context, just to use an attribute does not match this and it also decreases performance, since some data may be cached.

Example of paginated return of action in the current ViewSet structure:

from rest_framework import viewsets, generics
from rest_framework.decorators import action

class MyViewSet(viewsets.ViewSet, generics.GenericAPIView):
    queryset = MyModel.objects.all()
    serializer_class = MyModelSerializer

    @action(detail=False, methods=['get'], pagination_class=MyPaginationClass)
    def list_paginated_objects(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        my_objects = self.paginate_queryset(self.queryset)

        return self.get_paginated_response(MyModelSerializer(my_objects, many=True).data)

With my suggestion, we can perform pagination in the ViewSet, without the need to inherit other classes and their methods.

Example of paginated return of action in the proposed ViewSet structure:

from rest_framework import viewsets
from rest_framework.decorators import action

class MyViewSet(viewsets.ViewSet):
    queryset = MyModel.objects.all()
    serializer_class = MyModelSerializer

    @action(detail=False, methods=['get'], pagination_class=MyPaginationClass)
    def list_paginated_objects(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        my_objects = self.paginate_queryset(self.queryset)

        return self.get_paginated_response(MyModelSerializer(my_objects, many=True).data)

[tomchristie]

Hi Paul, we're not accepting functionality changes to REST framework at this point in time.

https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

This section of the docs clarifies the behaviour here...

Pagination is only performed automatically if you're using the generic views or viewsets. If you're using a regular APIView, you'll need to call into the pagination API yourself to ensure you return a paginated response. See the source code for the mixins.ListModelMixin and generics.GenericAPIView classes for an example.