DRF: Manipulating serializer field layout

django, django-rest-framework

Solution

Answer 1

Looks to me like you need both - different view and serializer.

Simply because the view endpoint is not a sub-url of the first one, so they are not related - different view, even if they use the same model.

And different serializer - since you have a different field layout.

Not really sure how complicated is your case, but any code duplication can probably be solved by mixins anyway.

Answer 2

Depending on the use case:

- if you also need to write data using the same struct, you need to define your own field class and handle the parsing correctly

if it's just reading data, you should be fine with this:

class HouseGoogleSerializer(HouseSerializer):
    houseInfo = serializers.SerializerMethodField('get_house_info')

    class Meta:
        model = House
        fields = [...]

    def get_house_info(self, obj):
        return {'title': obj.name}

where `HouseSerializer` is your base house serializer.

Problem

I have a model that represents a house: ``` class House(models.Model): name = models.CharField(...) long = models.FloatField(...) lat = models.FloatField(...) ``` and a serializer to return a list of houses in their most basic representation: ``` class HouseSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer): class Meta: model = House fields = ('id', 'name') ``` and the view ``` class HouseList(generics.ListAPIView): queryset = House.objects.all() serializer_class = HouseSerializer ``` this works fine. I can visit `/api/house/` and I see a json list of houses: ``` { 'id': 1, 'name': 'Big House' }, { 'id': 1 'name': 'Small House', }... ``` Now I want to create a second view/resource at `/api/maps/markers/` that returns my houses as a list of Google-Map-Friendly markers of the format: ``` { 'id': 1, 'long': ..., 'lat': ..., 'houseInfo': { 'title': "Big House", } } ... ``` I can foresee two approaches: - perform this as a separate serializer (using the same view as before) and mapping out the alternative field layout. - perform this as a separate view (using the same serializer as before) and simply layout the fields before creating a `Response` but in neither approach am I clear on how to go about it nor which approach is preferable?

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