Dynamically include or exclude Serializer class fields

Question

In my User profile model I\'ve included a show_email field explicitly. So, to add this feature to my API, the UserSerializer class looks like this:

Answer 1

You could do this in your API view by overriding the method returning the response, i.e. the "verb" of the API view. For example, in a ListAPIView you would override get():

class UserList(generics.ListAPIView):
    model = django.contrib.auth.get_user_model()
    serializer_class = UserSerializer

    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = super(UserList, self).get(request, *args, **kwargs)
        for result in response.data['results']:
            if result['email'] is None:
                result.pop('email')
        return response

You would probably want to add some more checking for attributes, but that's the gist of how it could be done. Also, I would add that removing fields from some results may cause issues for the consuming application if it expects them to be present for all records.