Sorry on the slow reply.
But yea, I can complain at length.
- Model validations aren't run automatically. Need to call full_clean manually.
- EXCEPT when you're in a form! Forms have their own clean, which IS run automatically because is_valid() is run.
- This also happens to run the model's full_clean.
- DRF has its own version of create which is separate and also does not run full_clean.
- Validation errors in DRF's Serializers are a separate class of errors from model validations and thus model Val Errors are not handled automatically.
- Can't monkey patch models.Model.save to run full_clean automatically for because it breaks some models like User AND now it would run twice for Forms+Model[0].
Because of some very old web-forum style design decisions, model validations aren't unified thus the fragmentation makes you need to know whether you're calling .save()/.create() manually, are in a form, or in DRF. And it's been requested to change this behavior but it breaks backwards compat[0].
It's frustrating because in Rails this is a solved problem. Model validations ALWAYS run (and only once) because... I'm validating the model. Model validations == data validations which means it should be true for all areas regardless of caller, except in exceptions, then I should be required to be explicit when skipping (i.e. Rails) where as in Django I need to be explicit in running it - sometimes... depends where I am.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4441539/why-doesnt-djang...
