Django Rest Framework: pass user from view to serializer - django

Question

I have such view for user change password:
class ChangePasswordView(generics.UpdateAPIView):
serializer_class = ChangePasswordSerializer
permission_classes = [IsAuthenticated]
def put(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
data = request.data.copy()
data['user'] = self.request.user
serializer = self.get_serializer(data=data)
serializer.is_valid(raise_exception=True)
user = serializer.validated_data['user']
user.set_password(serializer.validated_data["new_password"])
user.save()
return Response(status=status.HTTP_204_NO_CONTENT)
And serializer for this view looks like this:
class ChangePasswordSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
old_password = serializers.CharField()
new_password = serializers.CharField()
new_password_retyped = serializers.CharField()
def validate(self, data):
old_password = data.get('old_password')
new_password = data.get('new_password')
new_password_retyped = data.get('new_password_retyped')
user = data.get('user')
# misc validation checks
data['user'] = user
return data
and my problem is that user object is not being passed to serializer, tried printing it to see content of data inside put:
<QueryDict: {'old_password': ['testpassword'], 'new_password': ['testpassword1'], 'new_password_retyped': ['testpassword1'], 'user': [<User: root>]}>
and inside serializer:
OrderedDict([('old_password', 'testpassword'), ('new_password', 'testpassword1'), ('new_password_retyped', 'testpassword1')])
As you can see, user is missing. First, I thought that it may have something to do with passing object to serializer so I changed data['user'] = self.request.user to data['user'] = self.request.user.username so it would only pass string with username, but with no luck

Answer 1

You cannot pass user to serializer this way because serializers drop data which is not relevent. Try doing something like this.
class ChangePasswordSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
old_password = serializers.CharField()
new_password = serializers.CharField()
new_password_retyped = serializers.CharField()
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
self.user = kwargs.pop('user')
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
def validate(self, data):
old_password = data.get('old_password')
new_password = data.get('new_password')
new_password_retyped = data.get('new_password_retyped')
user = self.user
# misc validation checks
data['user'] = user
return data
And pass user to serializer separately.
self.get_serializer(data=data, user=self.request.user)