Guidance Needed for Handling One-Time Errors.

[aparreno]

Hi! I'm new to the Django Styleguide and looking to implement its recommendations in my DRF project. However, I'm unsure about how to handle one-time errors. For example, consider the following case:
response = make_req({"cars_urls": urls, "user_id": created_id.id})
if response.status_code != 200:
return Response( {"error": "Failed to fetch the cars"}, status=status.HTTP_500_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR, )
My question is:

• Should this type of error handling be managed in the custom_exception_handler, potentially by raising a custom exception in the service layer and catching it there?
• Or is it better to handle such errors directly in the service layer using a try-except block and returning a Response object from the view?

[RadoRado]

@aparreno Hello & thank you for opening this issue 👋

To be honest, I'm a bit on the fence about this. Only yesterday I had to decide the exact same thing - how to return a one-time error?

My decision was to just return a Response, doing the one-time handling, without any message.

Yet, if I have to do it again in a different place, I'll most probably move this to the custom error handling with a proper exception class raised for that 👍

Generally speaking, if you extract the error formatting in a way that can be reused for returning a Response, then, you should be able to do ad-hoc decisions.

So, to summarize:

1. If this is just a one-time thing and no-one is actually going to be handling that error in a programatic way, what you've done is good-enough.
2. If this is going to be an occurring pattern, I'd move to the custom error handler of DRF

Let me know if this makes sense to you 👍