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Format Suffixes ​

Format suffixes allow your API endpoints to handle requests for different formats (like JSON or HTML) explicitly via the URL, rather than relying solely on HTTP Accept headers.

For example, a client can request http://example.com/api/users.json instead of sending an Accept: application/json header to http://example.com/api/users/.

Using format_suffix_patterns ​

To enable format suffixes, you append format_suffix_patterns to your URL configuration.

python
from django.urls import path
from rest_framework.urlpatterns import format_suffix_patterns
from myapp import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('snippets/', views.snippet_list),
    path('snippets/<int:pk>/', views.snippet_detail),
]

urlpatterns = format_suffix_patterns(urlpatterns)

By default, the allowed format suffixes are determined by the format attributes on your view's configured renderers.

View Handlers ​

When using format suffixes, you must update your view functions or methods to accept an optional format keyword argument.

Function-Based Views ​

python
from rest_framework.decorators import api_view
from rest_framework.response import Response

@api_view(['GET'])
def snippet_list(request, format=None):
    # View logic...
    return Response(data)

Class-Based Views ​

python
from rest_framework.views import APIView
from rest_framework.response import Response

class SnippetList(APIView):
    def get(self, request, format=None):
        # View logic...
        return Response(data)

Specifying Allowed Suffixes ​

You can pass allowed to format_suffix_patterns to restrict which suffixes are permitted, regardless of the configured renderers.

python
urlpatterns = format_suffix_patterns(urlpatterns, allowed=['json', 'html'])