How do I get my CreateAPIView to recognize the "validate' seciton of my serializer?

I’m using Django 3.2 and Django rest framework 3.12.2 and have django.contrib.auth installed. I would like to create an endpoint to create users, so I have set this up in my views …

class CreateUserView(CreateAPIView):

    model = User
    permission_classes = [
        IsAuthenticated
    ]
    serializer_class = UserSerializer

And I have created this serializer …

class UserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = User
        fields = ('username', 'password', 'email', 'id', 'first_name', 'last_name')
    
    def validate(self, data):
        errors = {}

        # required fields
        required_fields = ['username', 'password', 'email']
        for field in required_fields:
            if not data[field]:
                errors[field] = 'This field is required.'

        if errors:
            raise serializers.ValidationError(errors)

        return data

    def create(self, validated_data):
        user = User.objects.create_user(
            username=validated_data['username'],
            password=validated_data['password'],
            first_name=validated_data['first_name'],
            last_name=validated_data['last_name'],
            email=validated_data['email']
        )

        return user

Unfortunately when I submit a request withoutcertain fields (e.g. "email"),

read -d '' req << EOF
{
        "first_name": "Test 9999",
        "last_name": "Dave",
        "username": "test3@abc.com",
        "password": "password1"
}
EOF

curl --header "Content-type: application/json" --header "Authorization: Token 6cbf7a80c6dd40e84861c8de143c945aef725676" --data "$req" --request POST "http://localhost:8000/users/"

My validator isn’t running and instead I get errors in the "create" part of my serializer …

  File "/Users/davea/Documents/workspace/chicommons/maps/web/directory/serializers.py", line 453, in validate
    if not data[field]:
KeyError: 'email'

How do I structure my view such that the validator in my serializer will be recognized?

>Solution :

You can check with:

def validate(self, data):
    errors = {}
    
    # required fields
    required_fields = ['username', 'password', 'email']
    for field in required_fields:
        if field not in data:
            errors[field] = 'This field is required.'
    
    if errors:
        raise serializers.ValidationError(errors)

But likely it makes more sense to let the serializer validate these by making these fields required.