Storing multiple values in django model though serializer - django

Question

I am fairly new to django rest framework. I have these tables in my database:
1) MainCategroies - which stores a list of all education fields.
2) College - which stores list of all college of my state.
3) CollegeCategoryLink - which stores the link between colleges and the categories to which they belong( here same college can fall under multiple categories). created a model with two foreign-key column
4) Users - the users of my app.
5) UserCategoryLink - link between the users and their selected categories. created a model with two foreign-key column
6) UserCollegeLink - link between the users and their selected colleges. created a model with two foreign-key column
Now the users will select their preferable categories from the list
and that will be stored in my database and then i will return the
related colleges back. All the data will come in json format from my
ionic app.
i have written serializers for each model and created viewsets for CRUD operations. Now i am confused, how to store the data through viewset methods? I am currently doing this:
class UserCategoryLinkViewset(viewsets.ViewSet):
serializer_class = UserCategoryLinkSerializer
def create(self, request):
selectedCats = []
collegeList = []
data = JSONParser().parse(request)
for field in data:
selectedCats.append(field['cat'])
ucl = UserCategoryLink()
ucl.user = collegeAppUser.objects.get(id=field['user'])
ucl.cat = MainCategories.objects.get(id=field['cat'])
if not UserCategoryLink.objects.filter(user=field['user'], cat=field['cat']).exists():
ucl.save()
for cats in selectedCats:
queryset = CollegeCategoryLink.objects.filter(category_id=cats)
serializer = CollegeCategoryLinkSerializer(queryset, many=True)
for clg in serializer.data:
queryset_college = College.objects.filter(id=clg['college_id'])
serializer_college = CollegeSerializer(queryset_college, many=True)
collegeList.append(serializer_college.data)
return JSONResponse(collegeList)
And here are my serializers:
from rest_framework import serializers
from manageApp.models import collegeAppUser,MainCategories,UserCategoryLink, CollegeCategoryLink, College, UserCollegeLink
class collegeAppUserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = collegeAppUser
fields = ('id', 'username', 'password')
class MainCategorySerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = MainCategories
fields = ('id', 'category_name')
class UserCategoryLinkSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = UserCategoryLink
fields = ('id', 'user', 'cat')
class CollegeCategoryLinkSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = CollegeCategoryLink
fields = ('id', 'college_id', 'category_id')
class CollegeSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = College
fields = ('id', 'college_name', 'college_url')
class UserCollegeLinkSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = UserCollegeLink
fields = ('id', 'user', 'college')
But this is not the correct way to accomplish what i need to do as i am directly setting the data in my model and saving it, no use of serializer in here. I want to store the data through serializer rather then directly using my model.

Answer 1

Try to relate models.
You can see the rest framework documentation: Relations!
For your case, you would use Nested relationships! =]