One object only in GET method in Django REST Framework

You can simply use viewsets.ModelViewSet that natively implements list and retrieve.

You declare something like router.register('movies', my_views.MoviesViewSet) in you urls.py and

class MoviesViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset            = Movie.objects.all()
    serializer_class    = MovieSerializer
    permission_classes  = [IsAuthenticated, ]

    def get_queryset(self):
        return self.queryset

    def get_object(self):
        movie_id = self.kwargs['pk']
        return self.get_queryset().filter(id=movie_id)

    def retrieve(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        try:
            instance = self.get_object()
        except (Movie.DoesNotExist, KeyError):
            return Response({"error": "Requested Movie does not exist"}, status=status.HTTP_404_NOT_FOUND)
        serializer = self.get_serializer(instance)
        return Response(serializer.data)

    def list(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        queryset    = self.get_queryset()
        serializer  = self.get_serializer(queryset, many=True)
        return Response(serializer.data)

This approach implies that you declare a Serializer, just like:

class MovieSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model   = Movie
        fields  = '__all__'

Django simply maps HOST/movies/ to list (multiple objects) and HOST/movies/PK/ to retrieve method (one single object).

Docs:

• https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/viewsets/#modelviewset

• https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/serializers/#modelserializer

Hope it helps.

BR. Eduardo

When you make a GET request to "api/movies/1", the url is matched to the "api/movies" path (read more in the docs), and the MoviesView's get method is called. And your get() implementation just fetches all the movies (movies = Movie.objects.all()), serializes and returns them - that's why you get the entire list.

If you want to retrieve one specific object, you need to somehow specify which object you have in mind, using its primary key (in your case, id).
1. You have to define a separate path: movies/<int:pk>/ (btw, which Django version are you using? url has been deprecated, use path instead!)
2. You have to define a detail view to handle this new case, and pass it to the path function as the second argument.

This general problem can really be solved in many ways, and depending on your app you may want to use a ViewSet instead of views. Then you don't have to define paths (urls) separately - you can use a router. You can't use routers with your view, because router needs a viewset class as its argument.

If you provide more details, I could try to suggest something more specific.

My appurls.py: use path method

urlpatterns = [
path('movies', MoviesView.as_view(), name="MoviesView"),]

Maybe it works

Start by adding a format keyword argument to both of the views, like so

def snippet_list(request, format=None):

and

def snippet_detail(request, pk, format=None):

Now update the snippets/urls.py file slightly, to append a set of format_suffix_patterns in addition to the existing URLs

from django.urls import path

from rest_framework.urlpatterns import format_suffix_patterns

from snippets import views

urlpatterns = [

path('snippets/', views.snippet_list),

path('snippets/<int:pk>', views.snippet_detail),

]

urlpatterns = format_suffix_patterns(urlpatterns)