Custom full-response caching setup for Django Rest Framework list view where keys are unique URLs. Opted to not continue with the invalidation on model save code cause cache invalidation is hard.

cache_drf_list_view.py

def list(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
    # get the base url without any query params
    url = request.path
    params = []
    # build a list of 2-value tuples which contains query params
    for key, value in request.GET.iteritems():
        params.append((key, value))
    if params:
        # sort the params so e.g., ?bunny=cute&fox=sly is treated as the
        # same key as ?fox=sly&bunny=cute
        params.sort()
        # encode query params and append them to the base url
        url += urllib.urlencode(params)
    print url
    # see if request url is already in the cache
    response_data = cache.get(url)
    if response_data:
        print "cached"
        # return a response with the cached data
        return Response(response_data)
    else:
        print "not cached"
        # do all the business logic (database lookups, serialization,
        # etc.) that this method would do normally
        response = super(AuthorViewSet, self).list(request, *args, **kwargs)
        # cache the response for next time
        cache.set(url, response.data)
        return response