(DEPRECATED) Atomic transactions and Django Rest Framework

mixins.py

# NOTE This is probably no longer needed, now DRF does this 
# automatically if you have ATOMIC_REQUESTS enabled.
# https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework/pull/2887


from django.db import transaction

class AtomicMixin(object):
    """
    Ensures we rollback db transactions on exceptions.
    Idea from https://github.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework/pull/1204
    """
    @transaction.atomic()
    def dispatch(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return super(AtomicMixin, self).dispatch(*args, **kwargs)

    def handle_exception(self, *args, **kwargs):
        response = super(AtomicMixin, self).handle_exception(*args, **kwargs)

        if getattr(response, 'exception'):
            # We've suppressed the exception but still need to rollback any transaction.
            transaction.set_rollback(True)

        return response

This is not good. To achieve what this Mixin does you can just add ATIMIC_REQUESTS to the database settings. However, this is not recommended because you will start transaction for each read-only request as well. You want to define handlers for requests that change data: create, update, destroy. I published my version here https://gist.github.com/prudnikov/3a968a1ee1cf9b02730cc40bc1d3d9f2

@prudnikov well this was published 6 years ago, things have changed a lot since then both in django and in DRF.

Looks like DRF fixed this eventually: encode/django-rest-framework#2887