Django REST Framework: how serializer context works?

Question

It\'s a pretty standard task in Django REST Framework to supply additional args/kwargs to a serializer to set values of fields set not via reques

Answer 1

to set values of fields set not via request.data, but via the value in url parameters or cookies. For instance, I need to set user field of my Comment model equal to request.user upon POST request.

This is how I handle both cases in my ModelViewSet:

def perform_create(self, serializer):

    # Get article id from url e.g. http://myhost/article/1/comments/
    # obviously assumes urls.py is setup right etc etc
    article_pk = self.kwargs['article_pk']
    article = get_object_or_404(Article.objects.all(), pk=article_pk)

    # Get user from request
    serializer.save(author=self.request.user, article=article)

Unfortunately the nested objects is not standard for DRF but that's besides the point. :)