Django backend receives one less param than sent by frontend - django

Question

I have a small web app with AngularJS front-end and Django ReST in the back. There's a strange hitch going on when I make POST request to the web service: the browser console clearly shows 3 parameters being sent, but the backend logging reports only 2 params received. The result is that the server throws a code 500 error due to a bad database lookup.
Here's the code:
Client
var b = newQuesForm.username.value;
$http.post('/myapp/questions/new', {username:b,title:q.title,description:q.description}).
success(function(data, status, headers, config) {
$http.get('/myapp/questions').success(function(data){
$scope.questions = data;
q = null;
$scope.newQuesForm.$setPristine();
}).error(function(data, status, headers, config) {
console.log(headers+data);
});
}).
error(function(data, status, headers, config) {
console.log(headers+data);
});
Both my manual logging and the dev console show a string like:
{"username":"admin","description":"What's your name?","title":"question 1"}
Server
class CreateQuestionSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
author = UserSerializer(required=False)
title = serializers.CharField(max_length=150)
description = serializers.CharField(max_length=350)
def create(self, data):
q= Question()
d = data
q.title = d.get('title')
q.description = d.get("description")
q.author = User.objects.get(username=d.get('username'))
q.save()
return q
Server-side logging shows the username parameter never succeeds in making the trip, and thus I end up with code 500 and error message:
User matching query does not exist. (No user with id=none)
What's causing some of the data to get lost?

Answer 1

So it turns out the problem was really with the serialization of fields, as #nikhiln began to point out. I followed his lead to refactor the code, moving the create() method to api.py, rather than serializers.py, and stopped relying altogether on the client-side data for the user's identity, something that was a bit silly in the first place (passing User to a hidden input in the view, and then harvesting the username from there and passing it back to the server in the AJAX params). Here's the new code, that works perfectly:
class QuestionCreate(generics.CreateAPIView):
model = Question
serializer_class = CreateQuestionSerializer
def create(self, request,*args,**kwargs):
q= Question()
d = request.data
q.title = d.get('title')
q.description = d.get("description")
q.author = request.user
q.save()
if q.pk:
return Response({'id':q.pk,'author':q.author.username}, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)
return Response({'error':'record not created'}, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)
So here, I do it the right way: pull the User from the request param directly in the backend.