Get filter values from AllValuesMultipleFilter into view for DRF

[normic]

Recently, I stumbled across a behavior that looks wrong at first glance and that has already been mentioned in some issues and discussions.
On closer inspection, however, the behavior of Django Filter is absolutely correct.

About the “problem”:
I use the AllValuesMultipleFilter in one place to filter for the possible users.
This filter is used in a DRF ViewSet and consumed via API by a frontend.
In the frontend, a user filter is offered that is based on all active users.
If you now select a user that does not exist in the queryset to be filtered, DjangoFilter throws a 404.
Superficially, this should return a 200 with an empty result, but this is not correct because a user was searched for who does not appear in the AllValuesMultiple result. Ergo, 404 is correct.

Now to my question:
Is it possible to somehow get the results returned by AllValuesMultipleFilter into the view?
Then the respective frontend could simply use this data as the basis for the filter options, there would no longer be a 404 and the query would be correct in itself.

I hope this summarizes the problem clearly.

[carltongibson]

Are you building the UI in JavaScript? In which case you could get the choices from the users field of the filter set form and serialise those to send across.

Otherwise I'm still not quite sure what you mean: just use the Django form and it'll already have the right choices, would be the standard answer.

[normic]

Hi @carltongibson, sorry had some days off...but listened to Django Chat on the way back and remembered this open issue 😄

Back to topic:
The UI is build in Vue and it is only consuming the API endpoints from DRF. We do not have any Django Forms out there.
I thought about playing with the data from filterset_class or something like that.

[carltongibson]

The UI is build in Vue ...

OK, so then you can access filterset.form["your_field"].choices, and send those to the client in whatever format suits you.