Dfyjkt

I'm starting a project using an existing db. The models generated from inspectdb have

(...null=True, blank=True)

in various fields. The documentation mentions that the blank argument is related to django forms. I'm making a web service project, using django rest framework and the django ORM. Absolutely no view component (autogenerated forms, html templates, etc) of the MVC.

Does that mean it's safe to remove blank=True from my models?

Without blank=True your application will fail validation when trying to serialize data with blank fields. Django rest framework ModelSerializer enforces any kind of validation that is on the model fields. It works similarly to Django ModelForms.

If you're not using ModelSerializers and try to save a blank value against a field without blank=True your save method will throw an exception instead.

TL;DR: if you remove blank=True your DRF serializer will fail validation against empty fields.

Take a look at this question on how validation works in DRF.

Hope this helps!

Probably not.

Whatever your service is, you probably want to validate data. And Django's validation relies on that blank=True. It's not just for forms and templates. From the documentation:

blank is validation-related.

Django Rest Framework will use the blank attribute on a model field in serializer validation. When blank is False, which is the default value, the ModelSerializer will raise a ValidationError if a value is not set for this field in a POST request.

Basically, if you remove blank=True from a field and try to create a record with no value for that field, you will get a 400 response from your server.

Nothing will break, just this request will fail to create a resource. In my book I'd call that safe. It really just comes down to whether you want the field to be required or not. But since you have null=True, it seems reasonable to have blank=True.