Django deep serialization - follow reverse foreign key constraints - django

Question

I have two models with a foreign key relationship:
class Company(models.Model):
field 1
field 2
class Employee(models.Model):
company = Model.ForeignKey('Company')
field 3
field 4
I would like to JSON serialize a company instance, and include all employees that have foreign-key relationships to it. IE, I'd like to create JSON that looks something like the following, in that it includes all fields for a company and all fields for all related employees.
[
{
"pk": 2,
"model": "app.company",
"fields": {
"field1": "value",
"field2": "value",
"employee": [
{
"pk": 19,
"model": "app.employee",
"fields": {
"field3": "value",
"field4": "value",
}
},
{
"pk": 25,
"model": "app.employee",
"fields": {
"field3": "value",
"field4": "value",
}
}
]
}
}
]
The Django serializer doesn't serialize relationships. Other questions here have asked how to deep serialize, but in the opposite direction -- IE, serialize an employee along with its related company. Answers to these questions have pointed out that the wadofstuff django-full-serializer plugin allows you to do this kind of deep serialization. The problem is that the wadofstuff plugin only follows these relationships unidirectionally -- it won't follow a reverse foreign key constraint. So, I'm trying to roll my own here. Any suggestions on how to accomplish this?

Answer 1

So, here's a super budget way of doing this which works for my purposes, but I feel like there has to be a better way (including it here in case others are looking for how to do this). It works for me only because I'm sending just one Company object at a time, and as such the fact that it doesn't explicitly preserve the relationship hierarchy isn't a big deal.
Given Company instance of "company":
companyJSON = serializers.serialize('json', [company, ])
employeeJSON = serializers.serialize('json', company.employee_set.all())
fullJSON = companyJSON[:-1] + ", " + employeeJSON[1:]