Tutorial on Django REST Serializers - bounswe/bounswe2024group11 GitHub Wiki

Description

This tutorial shows the steps on how to implement a ModelSerializer

Declaring a Serializer

# inherit from Django's ModelSerializer
class MySerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        # specify which model to serialize
        model = MyModel
        # specify which fields of the model to serialize
        fields = ['id', 'account_name', 'users', 'created']
        # you can exclude some of them, instead of including as above
        # exclude = ['users']

Specifying Fields explicitly

You can add extra fields to a ModelSerializer or override the default fields by declaring fields on the class. You can make them read-only, or write-only. soruce="method_name" should be defined in Model <Your Model> (here Account Model).

class AccountSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    url = serializers.CharField(source='get_absolute_url', read_only=True)
    groups = serializers.PrimaryKeyRelatedField(many=True)

    class Meta:
        model = Account
        fields = ['url', 'groups']

Alternative read-only

class AccountSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Account
        fields = ['id', 'account_name', 'users', 'created']
        read_only_fields = ['account_name']

Note: There is a special-case where a read-only field is part of a unique_together constraint at the model level. In this case the field is required by the serializer class in order to validate the constraint, but should also not be editable by the user.

The right way to deal with this is to specify the field explicitly on the serializer, providing both the read_only=True and default=… keyword arguments.

One example of this is a read-only relation to the currently authenticated User which is unique_together with another identifier. In this case you would declare the user field like so:

user = serializers.PrimaryKeyRelatedField(read_only=True, default=serializers.CurrentUserDefault())

Keyword Arguments

There is also a shortcut allowing you to specify arbitrary additional keyword arguments on fields, using the extra_kwargs option. As in the case of read_only_fields, this means you do not need to explicitly declare the field on the serializer.

This option is a dictionary, mapping field names to a dictionary of keyword arguments. For example:

class CreateUserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = User
        fields = ['email', 'username', 'password']
        extra_kwargs = {'password': {'write_only': True}}

    def create(self, validated_data):
        user = User(
            email=validated_data['email'],
            username=validated_data['username']
        )
        user.set_password(validated_data['password'])
        user.save()
        return user

Serializer Relations

Relational fields are used to represent model relationships. They can be applied to ForeignKey, ManyToManyField and OneToOneField relationships, as well as to reverse relationships, and custom relationships such as GenericForeignKey.

class AlbumSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    tracks = serializers.PrimaryKeyRelatedField(many=True, read_only=True)

    class Meta:
        model = Album
        fields = ['album_name', 'artist', 'tracks']

It serializes the tracks. This Would serialize to the following representation:

{
    'album_name': 'Undun',
    'artist': 'The Roots',
    'tracks': [
        89,
        90,
        91,
        ...
    ]
}

There are also StringRelatedField and SlugRelatedFiled.

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