Django Rest Framework: Dynamically return subset of fields

Question

Problem

As recommended in the blogpost Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API, I would like to add a fields query parameter to a Django R

Answer 1

You could try Dynamic REST, which has support for dynamic fields (inclusion, exclusion), embedded / sideloaded objects, filtering, ordering, pagination, and more.

Answer 2

This functionality is available from a 3rd-party package.

pip install djangorestframework-queryfields

Declare your serializer like this:

from rest_framework.serializers import ModelSerializer
from drf_queryfields import QueryFieldsMixin

class MyModelSerializer(QueryFieldsMixin, ModelSerializer):
    ...

Then the fields can now be specified (client-side) by using query arguments:

GET /identities/?fields=id,data

Exclusion filtering is also possible, e.g. to return every field except id:

GET /identities/?fields!=id

disclaimer: I'm the author/maintainer.