> Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
>
> — [Linus Torvalds][cite]
Relational fields are used to represent model relationships. They can be applied to `ForeignKey`, `ManyToManyField` and `OneToOneField` relationships, as well as to reverse relationships, and custom relationships such as `GenericForeignKey`.
**Note:** The relational fields are declared in `relations.py`, but by convention you should import them from the `serializers` module, using `from rest_framework import serializers` and refer to fields as `serializers.<FieldName>`.
When using the `ModelSerializer` class, serializer fields and relationships will be automatically generated for you. Inspecting these automatically generated fields can be a useful tool for determining how to customize the relationship style.
To do so, open the Django shell, using `python manage.py shell`, then import the serializer class, instantiate it, and print the object representation…
>>> from myapp.serializers import AccountSerializer
>>> serializer = AccountSerializer()
>>> print repr(serializer) # Or `print(repr(serializer))` in Python 3.x.
AccountSerializer():
id = IntegerField(label='ID', read_only=True)
name = CharField(allow_blank=True, max_length=100, required=False)
In order to explain the various types of relational fields, we'll use a couple of simple models for our examples. Our models will be for music albums, and the tracks listed on each album.
*`queryset` - The queryset used for model instance lookups when validating the field input. Relationships must either set a queryset explicitly, or set `read_only=True`.
*`pk_field` - Set to a field to control serialization/deserialization of the primary key's value. For example, `pk_field=UUIDField(format='hex')` would serialize a UUID primary key into its compact hex representation.
**Note**: This field is designed for objects that map to a URL that accepts a single URL keyword argument, as set using the `lookup_field` and `lookup_url_kwarg` arguments.
This is suitable for URLs that contain a single primary key or slug argument as part of the URL.
If you require more complex hyperlinked representation you'll need to customize the field, as described in the [custom hyperlinked fields](#custom-hyperlinked-fields) section, below.
*`view_name` - The view name that should be used as the target of the relationship. If you're using [the standard router classes][routers] this will be a string with the format `<modelname>-detail`. **required**.
*`queryset` - The queryset used for model instance lookups when validating the field input. Relationships must either set a queryset explicitly, or set `read_only=True`.
*`lookup_field` - The field on the target that should be used for the lookup. Should correspond to a URL keyword argument on the referenced view. Default is `'pk'`.
*`lookup_url_kwarg` - The name of the keyword argument defined in the URL conf that corresponds to the lookup field. Defaults to using the same value as `lookup_field`.
*`format` - If using format suffixes, hyperlinked fields will use the same format suffix for the target unless overridden by using the `format` argument.
## SlugRelatedField
`SlugRelatedField` may be used to represent the target of the relationship using a field on the target.
By default this field is read-write, although you can change this behavior using the `read_only` flag.
When using `SlugRelatedField` as a read-write field, you will normally want to ensure that the slug field corresponds to a model field with `unique=True`.
*`slug_field` - The field on the target that should be used to represent it. This should be a field that uniquely identifies any given instance. For example, `username`. **required**
*`queryset` - The queryset used for model instance lookups when validating the field input. Relationships must either set a queryset explicitly, or set `read_only=True`.
This field can be applied as an identity relationship, such as the `'url'` field on a HyperlinkedModelSerializer. It can also be used for an attribute on the object. For example, the following serializer:
class AlbumSerializer(serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
*`view_name` - The view name that should be used as the target of the relationship. If you're using [the standard router classes][routers] this will be a string with the format `<model_name>-detail`. **required**.
*`lookup_field` - The field on the target that should be used for the lookup. Should correspond to a URL keyword argument on the referenced view. Default is `'pk'`.
*`lookup_url_kwarg` - The name of the keyword argument defined in the URL conf that corresponds to the lookup field. Defaults to using the same value as `lookup_field`.
*`format` - If using format suffixes, hyperlinked fields will use the same format suffix for the target unless overridden by using the `format` argument.
Be default nested serializers are read-only. If you want to to support write-operations to a nested serializer field you'll need to create either or both of the `create()` and/or `update()` methods, in order to explicitly specify how the child relationships should be saved.
class TrackSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = Track
fields = ('order', 'title')
class AlbumSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
tracks = TrackSerializer(many=True)
class Meta:
model = Album
fields = ('album_name', 'artist', 'tracks')
def create(self, validated_data):
tracks_data = validated_data.pop('tracks')
album = Album.objects.create(**validated_data)
for track_data in tracks_data:
Track.objects.create(album=album, **track_data)
return album
>>> data = {
'album_name': 'The Grey Album',
'artist': 'Danger Mouse',
'tracks': [
{'order': 1, 'title': 'Public Service Announcement', 'duration': 245},
{'order': 2, 'title': 'What More Can I Say', 'duration': 264},
To implement a custom relational field, you should override `RelatedField`, and implement the `.to_representation(self, value)` method. This method takes the target of the field as the `value` argument, and should return the representation that should be used to serialize the target. The `value` argument will typically be a model instance.
If you want to support a writable hyperlinked field then you'll also want to override `get_object`, in order to map incoming URLs back to the object they represent. For read-only hyperlinked fields there is no need to override this method.
The return value of this method should the object that corresponds to the matched URL conf arguments.
May raise an `ObjectDoesNotExist` exception.
## Example
Say we have a URL for a customer object that takes two keyword arguments, like so:
/api/<organization_slug>/customers/<customer_pk>/
This cannot be represented with the default implementation, which accepts only a single lookup field.
In this case we'd need to override `HyperlinkedRelatedField` to get the behavior we want:
from rest_framework import serializers
from rest_framework.reverse import reverse
class CustomerHyperlink(serializers.HyperlinkedRelatedField):
# We define these as class attributes, so we don't need to pass them as arguments.
Note that if you wanted to use this style together with the generic views then you'd also need to override `.get_object` on the view in order to get the correct lookup behavior.
Generally we recommend a flat style for API representations where possible, but the nested URL style can also be reasonable when used in moderation.
The `queryset` argument is only ever required for *writable* relationship field, in which case it is used for performing the model instance lookup, that maps from the primitive user input, into a model instance.
In version 2.x a serializer class could *sometimes* automatically determine the `queryset` argument *if* a `ModelSerializer` class was being used.
This behavior is now replaced with *always* using an explicit `queryset` argument for writable relational fields.
Doing so reduces the amount of hidden 'magic' that `ModelSerializer` provides, makes the behavior of the field more clear, and ensures that it is trivial to move between using the `ModelSerializer` shortcut, or using fully explicit `Serializer` classes.
The built-in `__str__` method of the model will be used to generate string representations of the objects used to populate the `choices` property. These choices are used to populate select HTML inputs in the browsable API.
To provide customized representations for such inputs, override `display_value()` of a `RelatedField` subclass. This method will receive a model object, and should return a string suitable for representing it. For example:
class TrackPrimaryKeyRelatedField(serializers.PrimaryKeyRelatedField):
Note that reverse relationships are not automatically included by the `ModelSerializer` and `HyperlinkedModelSerializer` classes. To include a reverse relationship, you must explicitly add it to the fields list. For example:
You'll normally want to ensure that you've set an appropriate `related_name` argument on the relationship, that you can use as the field name. For example:
If you have not set a related name for the reverse relationship, you'll need to use the automatically generated related name in the `fields` argument. For example:
See the Django documentation on [reverse relationships][reverse-relationships] for more details.
## Generic relationships
If you want to serialize a generic foreign key, you need to define a custom field, to determine explicitly how you want serialize the targets of the relationship.
For example, given the following model for a tag, which has a generic relationship with other arbitrary models:
class TaggedItem(models.Model):
"""
Tags arbitrary model instances using a generic relation.
And the following two models, which may be have associated tags:
class Bookmark(models.Model):
"""
A bookmark consists of a URL, and 0 or more descriptive tags.
"""
url = models.URLField()
tags = GenericRelation(TaggedItem)
class Note(models.Model):
"""
A note consists of some text, and 0 or more descriptive tags.
"""
text = models.CharField(max_length=1000)
tags = GenericRelation(TaggedItem)
We could define a custom field that could be used to serialize tagged instances, using the type of each instance to determine how it should be serialized.
class TaggedObjectRelatedField(serializers.RelatedField):
"""
A custom field to use for the `tagged_object` generic relationship.
If you need the target of the relationship to have a nested representation, you can use the required serializers inside the `.to_representation()` method:
raise Exception('Unexpected type of tagged object')
return serializer.data
Note that reverse generic keys, expressed using the `GenericRelation` field, can be serialized using the regular relational field types, since the type of the target in the relationship is always known.
For more information see [the Django documentation on generic relations][generic-relations].
