request.data in DRF vs request.body in Django

You should use request.data. It's more flexible, covers more use cases and it can be accessed as many times as needed. Quoting the docs:

Aboout request.data

REST framework introduces a Request object that extends the regular HttpRequest, and provides more flexible request parsing. The core functionality of the Request object is the request.data attribute, which is similar to request.POST, but more useful for working with Web APIs.

request.POST # Only handles form data. Only works for 'POST' method.

request.data # Handles arbitrary data. Works for 'POST', 'PUT' and 'PATCH' methods.

About request.body

The raw HTTP request body as a byte string. This is useful for processing data in different ways than conventional HTML forms: binary images, XML payload etc. For processing conventional form data, use HttpRequest.POST.

So unless you want to handle binary images or XML payload, never use request.body, it'll only be a simple string containing, well, the body of the request. Always use request.data which'll be the fully parsed body (i.e. a Python dict) which is much more convenient to handle.

In rest_framework.request.Request

• request.body is bytes, which is always available, thus there is no limit in usage
• request.data is a "property" method and can raise an exception, but it gives you parsed data, which are more convenient

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However, the world is not perfect and here is a case when request.body win

Consider this example:

If client send: content-type: text/plain

and your REST's endpoint doesn't accept text/plain

your server will return 415 Unsupported Media Type if you access request.data

But what if you know that json.loads(request.body) is correct json. So you want to use that and only request.body allow that.

FYI: A described example is a message of AWS SNS notification sent by AWS to HTTP endpoint. AWS SNS works as a client here and of course, this case is a bug in their SNS.

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Another example of benefits from request.body is a case when you have own custom parsing and you use own MIME format.