Document integration with Django's caching framework.

[jacobsvante]

As requested by @tomchristie. django-rest-framework can use Djangos internal caching mechanism to cache API responses. Document how it can be enabled for DRF (basically it works just like it would in a vanilla Django view, but it might be worth letting people know that DRF supports it).

[ross]

played around with using cache_page and it seems to work as expected, very cool.

moved on to require authentication for the api and have run in to problems. if you're not authenticated (token or session in my case) you get a 401. if you are authed you get a page that is aggressively cached. i'm using the following to cache authed requests.

# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11661503/django-caching-for-authenticated-users-only
def cache_on_auth(timeout):
    def decorator(view_func):
        @wraps(view_func, assigned=available_attrs(view_func))
        def _wrapped_view(request, *args, **kwargs):
            if request.user.is_authenticated():
                return cache_page(timeout)(view_func)(request, *args, **kwargs)
            else:
                return view_func(request, *args, **kwargs)
        return _wrapped_view
    return decorator

it works perfectly with SessionAuthentication, but not with TokenAuthentication. the issue is that TokenAuthentication doesn't authenticate the user until the view code happens so when

if request.user.is_authenticated(): 

is called the answer is no, the user has not authenticated with django. once you're in the rest framework code its request.user has been looked up by TokenAuthentication.

not sure what the (clean) solution is here. i'm playing around with implementing middleware that will attach a user to the request based on token in request.token_user. don't want to put it in user or else they'd be authenticated for the admin console/website in general with just the token. if that works out i'd stop using TokenAuthentication and create a custom authentication class that looks for token_user on the django request and returns it if it exists.

seems like it will work, but i wouldn't call it a clean solution. anyway, thought i'd post here in case someone has ideas or others run in to the same thing.

[xordoquy]

@tomchristie any tip on where we should put that ? May be a new entry in the topics ?

[tomchristie]

@xordoquy Most likely, yes.

[adamn]

It seems like this small cache documentation is sufficient to close this ticket.

[tomchristie]

@adamn That's a different aspect to the intent of this ticket.