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Best strategies for incorporating data from a RESTful api: forms vs serializers?

**tl;dr**
When pulling data into my django database from an api, should I use forms, or a [django rest framework](http://www.django-rest-framework.org/) serializer?

**What I did**
Based on some discussion in [another thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/7e0olm/how_to_save_json_api_response_in_database/), I built an ultra-simple example of how to extract data from an api, in this case the api for the video game Destiny 2:
https://github.com/cortical-iv/restit

Note this is essentially a port of UltimateDjango's [How to Consume REST APIs with Django & Python Requests](https://ultimatedjango.com/blog/how-to-consume-rest-apis-with-django-python-reques/).

My goal was to follow Section 12.1 of Two Scoops, and *Validate all incoming data with django forms.* But what I actually did was a two step process that I'm now thinking was sort of dumb (I pasted the code below the fold):

1. Bind data about path parameters in the url into a form.
2. After extracting the needed data from the response to `requests`, use a django rest framework *serializer* to validate and save that data.

Now that this is up and working, I realize I didn't actually really follow the advice from Two Scoops of importing through forms. I imported required *path* information (user name) through a form, but then did all the heavy lifting with the serializer. I now think it would be better to replace step 2 with another form (a SaveUser form) that itself includes all the fields I need in my database.

**Why I don't like what I did**
Why am I thinking my approach smells? A couple of reasons:

1. The serializer is overkill. I shouldn't need to invoke the django rest framework to do what I am doing. Why not stick with django forms until I need something more powerful?
2. I am doing so much processing on the Destiny 2 end points, that I can't even just apply the serializer to the output of `requests`. This may not be obvious from the simple example at my project.
3. Forms are awesome and I'm not even using them. Once I make some fields unique, calling `serializer.save()` just triggers a validation error. OTOH, using forms, you can feed it an instance to simply *update* the db row without having to do a lot of extra work. Forms have lots of cool stuff like this so it isn't clear, again, why a serializer from DRF is that helpful.

On the other hand, I am a django noob, so maybe there are benefits to pulling data in via a serializer that I don't appreciate. So I'm asking for advice: when pulling data from an api into a db (using `requests`), should I use a serializer, or a form? If a form, which I'm starting to think is the right answer, I'm a little confused about why the project I copied, from UltimateDjango, even used a serializer?

What conditions for that embedly api consumer made it smarter in his case, but not my case?

-----
Here is the `save_user` function I'm using, which contains the main logic:

def add_user(save_user_form):
"""
Validate form data containing 'display_name', request their info from server,
and pull in via a serializer. Returns dictionary with two keys:
'flag': 1 if successful, 0 if not, and None if that user is not a D2 player in PS4.
'message': message about the outcome (success, validation error, etc).
"""
add_result = {'flag': 0, 'message': ''}
if save_user_form.is_valid():
user_name = save_user_form.cleaned_data['display_name']
search_url = search_destiny_player_url(user_name)
search_response = requests.get(search_url, headers = {"X-API-Key": D2_KEY})
user_data = search_response.json()['Response']
if user_data:
submission_data = {'display_name': user_data[0]['displayName'], 'user_id': user_data[0]['membershipId']}
try:
serializer = SearchPlayerSerializer(data = submission_data)
print(repr(serializer)) #for debu

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