Each field in a Form class is responsible not only for validating data, but also for "cleaning" it — normalizing it to a consistent format.

— Django documentation

Serializer fields handle converting between primitive values and internal datatypes. They also deal with validating input values, as well as retrieving and setting the values from their parent objects.

Note: The serializer fields are declared in fields.py, but by convention you should import them using from rest_framework import serializers and refer to fields as serializers.<FieldName>.

Each serializer field class constructor takes at least these arguments. Some Field classes take additional, field-specific arguments, but the following should always be accepted:

The name of the attribute that will be used to populate the field. May be a method that only takes a self argument, such as Field(source='get_absolute_url'), or may use dotted notation to traverse attributes, such as Field(source='user.email').

The value source='*' has a special meaning, and is used to indicate that the entire object should be passed through to the field. This can be useful for creating nested representations. (See the implementation of the PaginationSerializer class for an example.)

Defaults to the name of the field.

Set this to True to ensure that the field is used when serializing a representation, but is not used when creating or updating an instance during deserialization.

Defaults to False

Set this to True to ensure that the field may be used when updating or creating an instance, but is not included when serializing the representation.

Defaults to False

Normally an error will be raised if a field is not supplied during deserialization. Set to false if this field is not required to be present during deserialization.

Defaults to True.

If set, this gives the default value that will be used for the field if no input value is supplied. If not set the default behavior is to not populate the attribute at all.

May be set to a function or other callable, in which case the value will be evaluated each time it is used.

A list of Django validators that should be used to validate deserialized values.

A dictionary of error codes to error messages.

Used only if rendering the field to HTML. This argument sets the widget that should be used to render the field. For more details, and a list of available widgets, see the Django documentation on form widgets.

A short text string that may be used as the name of the field in HTML form fields or other descriptive elements.

A text string that may be used as a description of the field in HTML form fields or other descriptive elements.

These generic fields are used for representing arbitrary model fields or the output of model methods.

A generic, read-only field. You can use this field for any attribute that does not need to support write operations.

For example, using the following model.

from django.db import models
from django.utils.timezone import now

class Account(models.Model):
    owner = models.ForeignKey('auth.user')
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    payment_expiry = models.DateTimeField()

    def has_expired(self):
        return now() > self.payment_expiry

A serializer definition that looked like this:

from rest_framework import serializers

class AccountSerializer(serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
    expired = serializers.Field(source='has_expired')

    class Meta:
        model = Account
        fields = ('url', 'owner', 'name', 'expired')

Would produce output similar to:

{
    'url': 'http://example.com/api/accounts/3/',
    'owner': 'http://example.com/api/users/12/',
    'name': 'FooCorp business account',
    'expired': True
}

By default, the Field class will perform a basic translation of the source value into primitive datatypes, falling back to unicode representations of complex datatypes when necessary.

You can customize this behavior by overriding the .to_native(self, value) method.

A field that supports both read and write operations. By itself WritableField does not perform any translation of input values into a given type. You won't typically use this field directly, but you may want to override it and implement the .to_native(self, value) and .from_native(self, value) methods.

A generic field that can be tied to any arbitrary model field. The ModelField class delegates the task of serialization/deserialization to its associated model field. This field can be used to create serializer fields for custom model fields, without having to create a new custom serializer field.

The ModelField class is generally intended for internal use, but can be used by your API if needed. In order to properly instantiate a ModelField, it must be passed a field that is attached to an instantiated model. For example: ModelField(model_field=MyModel()._meta.get_field('custom_field'))

Signature: ModelField(model_field=<Django ModelField instance>)

This is a read-only field. It gets its value by calling a method on the serializer class it is attached to. It can be used to add any sort of data to the serialized representation of your object. The field's constructor accepts a single argument, which is the name of the method on the serializer to be called. The method should accept a single argument (in addition to self), which is the object being serialized. It should return whatever you want to be included in the serialized representation of the object. For example:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.utils.timezone import now
from rest_framework import serializers

class UserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    days_since_joined = serializers.SerializerMethodField('get_days_since_joined')

    class Meta:
        model = User

    def get_days_since_joined(self, obj):
        return (now() - obj.date_joined).days

These fields represent basic datatypes, and support both reading and writing values.

A Boolean representation.

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.BooleanField.

A text representation, optionally validates the text to be shorter than max_length and longer than min_length. If allow_none is False (default), None values will be converted to an empty string.

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.CharField or django.db.models.fields.TextField.

Signature: CharField(max_length=None, min_length=None, allow_none=False)

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.URLField. Uses Django's django.core.validators.URLValidator for validation.

Signature: URLField(max_length=200, min_length=None)

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.SlugField.

Signature: SlugField(max_length=50, min_length=None)

A field that can accept a value out of a limited set of choices. Optionally takes a blank_display_value parameter that customizes the display value of an empty choice.

Signature: ChoiceField(choices=(), blank_display_value=None)

A text representation, validates the text to be a valid e-mail address.

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.EmailField

A text representation, that validates the given value matches against a certain regular expression.

Uses Django's django.core.validators.RegexValidator for validation.

Corresponds to django.forms.fields.RegexField

Signature: RegexField(regex, max_length=None, min_length=None)

A date and time representation.

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.DateTimeField

When using ModelSerializer or HyperlinkedModelSerializer, note that any model fields with auto_now=True or auto_now_add=True will use serializer fields that are read_only=True by default.

If you want to override this behavior, you'll need to declare the DateTimeField explicitly on the serializer. For example:

class CommentSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    created = serializers.DateTimeField()

    class Meta:
        model = Comment

Note that by default, datetime representations are determined by the renderer in use, although this can be explicitly overridden as detailed below.

In the case of JSON this means the default datetime representation uses the ECMA 262 date time string specification. This is a subset of ISO 8601 which uses millisecond precision, and includes the 'Z' suffix for the UTC timezone, for example: 2013-01-29T12:34:56.123Z.

Signature: DateTimeField(format=None, input_formats=None)

• format - A string representing the output format. If not specified, this defaults to None, which indicates that Python datetime objects should be returned by to_native. In this case the datetime encoding will be determined by the renderer.
• input_formats - A list of strings representing the input formats which may be used to parse the date. If not specified, the DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS setting will be used, which defaults to ['iso-8601'].

DateTime format strings may either be Python strftime formats which explicitly specify the format, or the special string 'iso-8601', which indicates that ISO 8601 style datetimes should be used. (eg '2013-01-29T12:34:56.000000Z')

A date representation.

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.DateField

Signature: DateField(format=None, input_formats=None)

• format - A string representing the output format. If not specified, this defaults to None, which indicates that Python date objects should be returned by to_native. In this case the date encoding will be determined by the renderer.
• input_formats - A list of strings representing the input formats which may be used to parse the date. If not specified, the DATE_INPUT_FORMATS setting will be used, which defaults to ['iso-8601'].

Date format strings may either be Python strftime formats which explicitly specify the format, or the special string 'iso-8601', which indicates that ISO 8601 style dates should be used. (eg '2013-01-29')

A time representation.

Optionally takes format as parameter to replace the matching pattern.

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.TimeField

Signature: TimeField(format=None, input_formats=None)

• format - A string representing the output format. If not specified, this defaults to None, which indicates that Python time objects should be returned by to_native. In this case the time encoding will be determined by the renderer.
• input_formats - A list of strings representing the input formats which may be used to parse the date. If not specified, the TIME_INPUT_FORMATS setting will be used, which defaults to ['iso-8601'].

Time format strings may either be Python strftime formats which explicitly specify the format, or the special string 'iso-8601', which indicates that ISO 8601 style times should be used. (eg '12:34:56.000000')

An integer representation.

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.IntegerField, django.db.models.fields.SmallIntegerField, django.db.models.fields.PositiveIntegerField and django.db.models.fields.PositiveSmallIntegerField

A floating point representation.

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.FloatField.

A decimal representation, represented in Python by a Decimal instance.

Has two required arguments:

• max_digits The maximum number of digits allowed in the number. Note that this number must be greater than or equal to decimal_places.

• decimal_places The number of decimal places to store with the number.

For example, to validate numbers up to 999 with a resolution of 2 decimal places, you would use:

serializers.DecimalField(max_digits=5, decimal_places=2)

And to validate numbers up to anything less than one billion with a resolution of 10 decimal places:

serializers.DecimalField(max_digits=19, decimal_places=10)

This field also takes an optional argument, coerce_to_string. If set to True the representation will be output as a string. If set to False the representation will be left as a Decimal instance and the final representation will be determined by the renderer.

If unset, this will default to the same value as the COERCE_DECIMAL_TO_STRING setting, which is True unless set otherwise.

Signature: DecimalField(max_digits, decimal_places, coerce_to_string=None)

Corresponds to django.db.models.fields.DecimalField.

A file representation. Performs Django's standard FileField validation.

Corresponds to django.forms.fields.FileField.

Signature: FileField(max_length=None, allow_empty_file=False)

• max_length designates the maximum length for the file name.

• allow_empty_file designates if empty files are allowed.

An image representation.

Corresponds to django.forms.fields.ImageField.

Requires either the Pillow package or PIL package. The Pillow package is recommended, as PIL is no longer actively maintained.

Signature and validation is the same as with FileField.

Note: FileFields and ImageFields are only suitable for use with MultiPartParser, since e.g. json doesn't support file uploads. Django's regular FILE_UPLOAD_HANDLERS are used for handling uploaded files.

If you want to create a custom field, you'll probably want to override either one or both of the .to_native() and .from_native() methods. These two methods are used to convert between the initial datatype, and a primitive, serializable datatype. Primitive datatypes may be any of a number, string, date/time/datetime or None. They may also be any list or dictionary like object that only contains other primitive objects.

The .to_native() method is called to convert the initial datatype into a primitive, serializable datatype. The from_native() method is called to restore a primitive datatype into its initial representation.

Let's look at an example of serializing a class that represents an RGB color value:

class Color(object):
    """
    A color represented in the RGB colorspace.
    """
    def __init__(self, red, green, blue):
        assert(red >= 0 and green >= 0 and blue >= 0)
        assert(red < 256 and green < 256 and blue < 256)
        self.red, self.green, self.blue = red, green, blue

class ColourField(serializers.WritableField):
    """
    Color objects are serialized into "rgb(#, #, #)" notation.
    """
    def to_native(self, obj):
        return "rgb(%d, %d, %d)" % (obj.red, obj.green, obj.blue)

    def from_native(self, data):
        data = data.strip('rgb(').rstrip(')')
        red, green, blue = [int(col) for col in data.split(',')]
        return Color(red, green, blue)

By default field values are treated as mapping to an attribute on the object. If you need to customize how the field value is accessed and set you need to override .field_to_native() and/or .field_from_native().

As an example, let's create a field that can be used represent the class name of the object being serialized:

class ClassNameField(serializers.Field):
    def field_to_native(self, obj, field_name):
        """
        Serialize the object's class name.
        """
        return obj.__class__.__name__

The following third party packages are also available.

The drf-compound-fields package provides "compound" serializer fields, such as lists of simple values, which can be described by other fields rather than serializers with the many=True option. Also provided are fields for typed dictionaries and values that can be either a specific type or a list of items of that type.

The drf-extra-fields package provides extra serializer fields for REST framework, including Base64ImageField and PointField classes.

The django-rest-framework-gis package provides geographic addons for django rest framework like a GeometryField field and a GeoJSON serializer.

The django-rest-framework-hstore package provides an HStoreField to support django-hstore DictionaryField model field.