Raising Exception messages in Django Rest Framework

Question

I simply want to surface an Exception message as a bad response in DRF.

The Exception can come from anywhere in the request. So for example, some nested function can have:

raise Exception('Something went wrong at this particular point')

And then in my view handler, i'd simply catch the Exception and raise it:

    except Exception as e:
        raise e

This raises an Exception in my application, but there is no way to parse the response to get my custom message.

I can try this:

return Response(e, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

But that returns an Exception itself:

Object of type Exception is not JSON serializable

So how can I simply return my Exception message as a 400?

Wes Hardaker · Accepted Answer · 2021-06-15 20:29:52Z

1

You'll likely need to cast e to a string first: try:

return Response(str(e), status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

The underlying Response function is trying to serialize it, and the Exception class can't be converted to JSON. You might want to return a more complete json structure too:

return Response({'error_message': str(e)}, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

answered Jun 15, 2021 at 20:29

Wes Hardaker

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1 Comment

AlxVallejo Over a year ago

Genius. Thank you

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