Is it necessary to use serializers in Django rest? I'm building a project where I came across a scenario where fields in forms add dynamically and then I need to validated and save data into DB. Since fields in forms dynamic, How can we handle this in serializer?
Can we do validations and saving without using serializes?
It is not necessary to use a serializer. You can do what you would like to achieve in a view. However, serializers help you a lot. If you don't want to use serializer, you can inherit APIView at a function-based-view. However, serializer is the first line of defence and valdidates your data. If you avoid validation, an exception can occur at database at the latest. Only a model-serializer or model-form can validate your data and use the model-setting you made. You can validate your data by hand and write a custom validator.
You can bypass a validation in a serializer. What you have to do is overriding of to_internal().
serializer
def to_internal(self, data):
return data
def create(self, data):
# do your saving stuff
return saved_instance
If request.data contains fields that are part of your model but not always part of your requested data, you can set
class Meta:
extra_kwargs = {'field_that_is_not_mandatory': {'required': True}}
Maybe the api can help you as well.
If you work with Django rest API. So serializer is a good option to convert data into JSON format. If you don't want to use a serializer you can use Django form rather than serializer.
Related
In django, I was able to pass data using dictionary. Like I set the objects in my dictionary and pass it in return render and call the object in frontend (return render(request, 'c.html', context) right? so How can I do this in django rest?
You may return Response in rest framework like this if you are using django rest framework.
context = {'key':'value'}
return Response(context)
Or if you are using a serializer then
return Response(serializer.data)
In Django REST Framework the concept of Serializing is to convert DB data to a datatype that can be used by javascript. Every serializer comes with some field that is going to be processed. For example, if you have a class with the name Employee and its fields as Employee_id, Employee_name, is_admin, etc. Then, you would need AutoField, CharField, and BooleanField for storing and manipulating data through Django. Similarly, serializer also works with the same principle and has fields that are used to create a serializer.
DictField is basically a dictionary field that validates the input against a dictionary of objects. It has the following arguments:
child and allow_empty like this>>>
field_name = serializers.DictField(*args, **kwargs)
for example document = DictField(child=CharField())
you can use serializer like below>>>
from rest_framework import serializer
class Any(object):
def __init__(self, dictonary):
self.dict = dictionary
class AnySerializer(serializers.Serializer):
dictionary = serializers.DictField(
child = serializers.CharField())
you can visit similar problem for understanding through the real problem.
And this link is the complete documentation of your problem. You can check this out.
I'm exposing an REST api for legacy application.
I have a Company model class that defines the following fields:
address_street (required)
address_street_number (required)
shipping_address_street (optional)
shipping_address_street_number (optional)
billing_address_street (optional)
... you got the point
I would like to group all address fields into an Adress serializer in order to have a cleaner structure.
Some thing like:
{
"adress": {"street": "foo", "street_number": "bar"},
"shipping_address": {"street": "ham", "street_number": "spam"},
"billing_address": null,
}
So far, I can create a CompanySerializer from a rest_framework.serializers.Serializer and manually build my Company objects from this.
It is tedious, but it will work.
But how can I build a rest_framework.serializers.ModelSerializer for my Company model, changing the way fields are structured to have my model fields automatically populated by rest framework ?
DRF nested model serializers seems to only work for relations, not groups of fields.
Am I to build my models instances by hands or is there a way to decouple the representation of a model serializer to my object ?
From ModelSerializer documentation
The process of automatically determining a set of serializer fields
based on the model fields is reasonably complex
You probably should stick to the "tedious" method you mention (you will have to put in some effort if serializer representation and model fields have different structures altogether).
ModelSerializer is tightly linked to the model in question, so overriding that behaviour seems to be for little benefit when you can do the same thing using a plain Serializer and put object creation under save.
Maybe you need to override the data property/method on the Serializer subclass so that you get a dict that is fit for consumption directly by the model, that might make it less tedious
You can build custom serialiser fields with SerializerMethodField:
from rest_framework.fields import SerializerMethodField
class AdressSerializer(ModelSerializer):
adress = SerializerMethodField()
shipping_address = SerializerMethodField()
def get_adress(self, instance):
return {
"street": instance.address_street,
"street_number": instance.address_street_number
}
def get_shipping_address(self, instance):
// same approach as above
If needed to populate the model from the same data representation, the best approach is to override serialiser's save method. I don't think there is an "automatic" way of doing it.
Using latest version of Django and DRF.
I have a rather complex requirement I can't find a solution for. I'll try to simplify it.
Let's say I have a model that has two fields. field_a and field_b
I have a ModelSerializer for it. I POST a request with its fields. The fields get validated with the model and then against my two serializer functions validate_field_a and validate_field_b. All is well.
Now I'd like my POST request to include a third field that is not a member of that model. let's call it field_c. I have a custom def create(self, validated_data): in my serializer which saves everything to the database.
with regards to field_c I would like to:
Custom Validate it. just like I do with the other two fields.
Require that it is mandatory for the whole request to succeed and if it's not, issue a "Field is required" error just like if I forgot to POST one of my required model fields.
Have the chance to take field_c and save it onto a totally different unrelated Model's row in the db.
I can't seem to get around that. If I add field_c to the fields meta - it throws an exception saying justifiably that field_c is not in my model. If I don't include it in fields, the validate_field_c which I really want to put there doesn't even get called.
What can I do?
You can add the custom field in your serializer as a write_only field and override the create method so that you can handle the custom field's value.
Something like this:
class MySerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
field_c = serializers.CharField(write_only=True)
class Meta:
model = MyModel
fields = ('field_a', 'field_b', 'field_c')
def validate_field_c(self, value):
if value is 'test':
raise ValidationError('Invalid')
return value
def create(self, validated_data, **kwargs):
field_c = validated_data.pop('field_c')
return MyModel.objects.create(**validated_data)
Don't use ModelSerializer for this - use a serializer that recreates the same fields as your model & include field_c as you would.
I understand that you want your model to do some of the work in the validation process but the design of DRF is such that it isolates these responsibilities. You can read more about it here. Basically, the serializer should be the one doing all the validation heavy-lifting.
Of course, this means that you'll have to explicitly define the validation methods in the serializer.
In your custom create() method you can create the model instance or do whatever you want in it as required.
I am building a web app using Django that is pretty much only serving as the API server. I have a single-page application that connects to it as well as an Android client. I have a need to modify some of the incoming POST requests that are coming through.
My two use cases:
If during the registration process the user does not select an avatar image to upload (which is a simple TextField that is the URL to the image), I should be able to insert the default avatar URL. So something like if request.data["avatar"] is None: <use default>
The incoming "timestamp" requests from the Android client are all unix timestamps. I would like to convert this to Django's datetime on the fly - so, current request comes in with date_time = 1473387225, I'd like to convert that to a DateTime object.
Now, I'm already doing something similar for certain POST parameters. The way I do it right now is in the post() function of my generic ListCreateApiView I would directly modify the request object and then call the self.create() with that new request object. Is this the right way, or is there a much better way to do it?
Thanks!
If you are using django-rest-framework these things can be done by serializers.
For avatar use an URLField with default value.
For the timestamp you should probably create a custom field.
Check out this site: http://www.cdrf.co It is an easily navigable display of all the methods available on a given class. You can simply use this to overwrite the View you are using. If a model ViewSet, you likely want perform_create and perform_update.
I often do something like this:
class SomeViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
queryset = SomeModel.objects.all()
serializer_class = SomeModelSerializer
def perform_create(self, serializer):
data = self.request.data
# make some changes to self.request here
serializer.save(
#change some things here
field='some new value'
)
You can do this in a number of ways. As a part of your validation or in the to_internal_value of the request serializer or in a custom field serializer.
Heres an example of doing this as a part of a custom field serializer.
class AccountCreationSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
avatar = AvatarField(
required=False
allow_files=True
)
# Custom Field Serializer
class AvatarField(serializers.FilePathField):
def to_internal_value(self, value):
user_defined_path = super(AvatarField, self).to_internal_value(value)
if user_defined_path:
return user_defined_path
return default_path
I have a simple Model that stores the user that created it with a ForeignKey. The model has a corresponding ModelSerializer and ModelViewSet.
The problem is that when the user submits a POST to create a new record, the user should be set by the backend. I tried overriding perform_create on the ModelViewSet to set the user, but it actually still fails during the validation step (which makes sense). It comes back saying the user field is required.
I'm thinking about overriding the user field on the ModelSerializer to be optional, but I feel like there's probably a cleaner and more efficient way to do this. Any ideas?
I came across this answer while looking for a way to update values before the control goes to the validator.
This might be useful for someone else - here's how I finally did it (DRF 3) without rewriting the whole validator.
class MyModelSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
def to_internal_value(self, data):
data['user'] = '<Set Value Here>'
return super(MyModelSerializer, self).to_internal_value(data)
For those who're curious, I used this to round decimal values to precision defined in the model so that the validator doesn't throw errors.
You can make the user field as read_only.
This will ensure that the field is used when serializing a representation, but is not used when creating or updating an instance during deserialization.
In your serializers, you can do something like:
class MyModelSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = MyModel
extra_kwargs = {
'user' : {'read_only' : True} # define the 'user' field as 'read-only'
}
You can then override the perform_create() and set the user as per your requirements.
Old topic but it could be useful for someone.
If you want to alter your data before validation of serializer:
serializer.initial_data["your_key"] = "your data"
serializer.is_valid(raise_exception=True)