REST framework is suitable for returning both API style responses, and regular HTML pages. Additionally, serializers can be used as HTML forms and rendered in templates.
In order to return HTML responses you'll need to either `TemplateHTMLRenderer`, or `StaticHTMLRenderer`.
The `TemplateHTMLRenderer` class expects the response to contain a dictionary of context data, and renders an HTML page based on a template that must be specified either in the view or on the response.
The `StaticHTMLRender` class expects the response to contain a string of the pre-rendered HTML content.
Because static HTML pages typically have different behavior from API responses you'll probably need to write any HTML views explicitly, rather than relying on the built-in generic views.
Here's an example of a view that returns a list of "Profile" instances, rendered in an HTML template:
**views.py**:
from my_project.example.models import Profile
from rest_framework.renderers import TemplateHTMLRenderer
The `render_form` tag takes an optional `template_pack` argument, that specifies which template directory should be used for rendering the form and form fields.
REST framework includes three built-in template packs, all based on Bootstrap 3. The built-in styles are `horizontal`, `vertical`, and `inline`. The default style is `horizontal`. To use any of these template packs you'll want to also include the Bootstrap 3 CSS.
The following HTML will link to a CDN hosted version of the Bootstrap 3 CSS:
Third party packages may include alternate template packs, by bundling a template directory containing the necessary form and field templates.
Let's take a look at how to render each of the three available template packs. For these examples we'll use a single serializer class to present a "Login" form.
Serializer fields can have their rendering style customized by using the `style` keyword argument. This argument is a dictionary of options that control the template and layout used.
The most common way to customize the field style is to use the `base_template` style keyword argument to select which template in the template pack should be use.
For example, to render a `CharField` as an HTML textarea rather than the default HTML input, you would use something like this:
details = serializers.CharField(
max_length=1000,
style={'base_template': 'textarea.html'}
)
If you instead want a field to be rendered using a custom template that is *not part of an included template pack*, you can instead use the `template` style option, to fully specify a template name:
Field templates can also use additional style properties, depending on their type. For example, the `textarea.html` template also accepts a `rows` property that can be used to affect the sizing of the control.
