drf-action-serializer 0.1.1

A serializer that handles field configuration with multiple actions from ViewSets.

Action Serializer

Source: https://github.com/gregschmit/drf-action-serializer

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/drf-action-serializer/

Action Serializer is a Django Rest Framework extension package that provides a Serializer that implements per-action field configuration for use in your drf-powered API.

The Problem: When building APIs, often you want different serializers for different actions, such as less fields on a list view vs a detail view. Normally you would have to build multiple Serializers to support this.

The Solution: This app provides the ModelActionSerializer which allows you to easily configure per-action fields.

How to Use

$ pip install drf-action-serializer

In your serializer, inherit from action_serializer.ModelActionSerializer.

In your serializer, you can add a action_fields dictionary to the Meta class and use fields, exclude, and extra_kwargs under the action key. The example in this project shows how to remder a smaller list of attributes for a list view compared to the detail view.

from django.contrib.auth.models import Group
from .serializers import ModelActionSerializer


class GroupActionSerializer(ModelActionSerializer):
    """
    An example serializer for the Django ``Group`` model with details, and the
    list view has less fields than the detail.
    """

    class Meta:
        model = Group
        fields = ('id', 'name', 'permissions')
        action_fields = {
            'list': {
                'fields': ('id', 'name'),
            },
        }

In your ViewSet, just set the serializer like normal:

from rest_framework.viewsets import ModelViewSet


class GroupViewSet(ModelViewSet):
    """
    An example viewset for the Django ``Group`` model.
    """
    serializer_class = GroupActionSerializer
    queryset = Group.objects.all()

Tests

Since this package is essentially a relatively minor change to Django Rest Framework, I will be testing this by incorporating the code into that project.

This package should be considered a proof of concept. If you run this as a project (using python manage.py runserver), you will see that the API renders a Group model with different fields in the list vs detail actions.