Field with default value appears as optional in schema

Question

Describe the bug My code has the following model with a boolean field, published, with a default value of false

class PublishableModel(models.Model):
    """Fields used to determine if and when something is published."""
    published = models.BooleanField(default=False)
    publish_date = models.DateTimeField(blank=True, null=True)

However, the schema that drf-spectacular produces shows published as optional.

For example:

/**
 * 
 * @type {boolean}
 * @memberof Article
 */
published?: boolean;

Expected behavior: Since there is a default value - all response types should appear in the required section of the model for methods that return an Article but optional for methods that are creating an Article.

Update: drf-spectacular does indeed provide a way to distinguish between request and response types using the "COMPONENT_SPLIT_REQUEST=True" setting.

However the types it emits are still the same for both Req/Res with a default parameter, so I still don't see how to leverage this in my situation. My expected behavior would still be that Res type would have the published field marked as required.

Answer 1

There is an open issue^1 about it which shows a couple of workarounds. It also has a response that explains the reasoning.

At the moment, you can use one of these workarounds:

1. create different serializers for requests and responses, and make all fields for the response serializer readonly.
2. Create a custom post-processing hook that sets all fields to required for response serializers (see the github issue for an example)