Do not treat missing non-form data as empty dict

[peterthomassen]

This allows views to distinguish missing payload from empty payload.

Related: #3647, #4566

Description

continuation of #7195

[peterthomassen]

@tomchristie Do you need anything else from me to take the next step with this?

[peterthomassen]

@tomchristie I rebased this PR on top the the current master and resolved conflicts.

Is there anything else I can do to help with this PR?

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[peterthomassen]

I think this is still current.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[peterthomassen]

I think this is still current.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[peterthomassen]

I think this is still current.

[peterthomassen]

@auvipy Do you think this can be revived?

[auvipy]

will come back to this next sun/monday

[lovelydinosaur]

I'm not convinced that adding new API surface area to REST framework is a net positive.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[Copilot]

Pull Request Overview

This PR updates the handling of missing non-form data so that it is not treated as an empty dict but instead uses a configurable DEFAULT_MISSING_DATA setting. Key changes include:

• Adding a serializer flag (allow_null) based on query parameters to alter behavior in the view.
• Updating tests to assert the correct response when no data is provided.
• Introducing the DEFAULT_MISSING_DATA setting in both the settings and request parsing layers, with corresponding documentation updates.

Reviewed Changes

Copilot reviewed 6 out of 6 changed files in this pull request and generated no comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
tests/test_testing.py	Updates to test cases for missing payload behavior and view configuration.
tests/test_request.py	Adjusted expectations for request.data to reflect missing data as None.
rest_framework/settings.py	Introduction of DEFAULT_MISSING_DATA with a default value of None.
rest_framework/request.py	Use of DEFAULT_MISSING_DATA for non-form missing payloads.
docs/api-guide/settings.md	Documentation update for DEFAULT_MISSING_DATA setting.
docs/api-guide/requests.md	Updated documentation to explain request.data behavior when no payload is sent.

Comments suppressed due to low confidence (1)

tests/test_testing.py:213

• Consider adding explicit assertions in the test_missing_post_payload_coerced_dict_uses_default_boolean_value test case to verify that when DEFAULT_MISSING_DATA is overridden to an empty dict, the response data exactly equals {}.

@override_settings(REST_FRAMEWORK={'DEFAULT_MISSING_DATA': {}})

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[peterthomassen]

@auvipy Any follow-up after the review? Thanks!