Django Custom View Decorator with Arguments

Thu 23 February 2012 | Last updated on Tue 06 December 2022

To make my life easier I made a simple decorator which checks if the parameters are present in the request.POST or request.GET and returns a response if they are not.

It accepts a list of parameters in string format and will loop through each parameter to check if they are present in the request.POST.

I noticed there weren't a lot of guides about how to write a decorator for Django which takes arguments. I based my code on this tutorial, it's a really great guide which helps you understand Python decorators at a new level: Amazing insight about Python decorators

Here is the code I wrote for the decorator:

def required_parameters(parameters=('email', 'api_key'), http_method='POST'):  
    """  
    Check if the required parameters are present in the request  
    @param parameters: The names of the parameters that should be supplied  
    """  
    def inner_decorator(fn):  
        def wrapped(request, *args, **kwargs):  
            # check if the user api_key matches  
            for parameter in parameters:  
            if parameter not in getattr(request, http_method):  
                return json_response({'success': False, 'errors': 'Please use the Web API correctly and supply the parameter: '+parameter})  
            # Proceed like normally with the request  
            return fn(request, *args, **kwargs)  
        return wraps(fn)(wrapped)  
    return inner_decorator  
    [/python]

An example of using it in your view:

@required_parameters(parameters=('email', 'username', 'password'))  
def view_which_requires_email_username_and_password(request)  
    bla = 'bla'
    return HttpResponse(bla)

Sam Stoelinga

Django Custom View Decorator with Arguments