Django Rest Framework with ChoiceField

Question

I have a few fields in my user model that are choice fields and am trying to figure out how to best implement that into Django Rest Framework.

Below is some simplifi

Answer 1

I suggest to use django-models-utils with a custom DRF serializer field

Code becomes:

# models.py
from model_utils import Choices

class User(AbstractUser):
    GENDER = Choices(
       ('M', 'Male'),
       ('F', 'Female'),
    )

    gender = models.CharField(max_length=1, choices=GENDER, default=GENDER.M)


# serializers.py 
from rest_framework import serializers

class ChoicesField(serializers.Field):
    def __init__(self, choices, **kwargs):
        self._choices = choices
        super(ChoicesField, self).__init__(**kwargs)

    def to_representation(self, obj):
        return self._choices[obj]

    def to_internal_value(self, data):
        return getattr(self._choices, data)

class UserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    gender = ChoicesField(choices=User.GENDER)

    class Meta:
        model = User

# viewsets.py
class UserViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = User.objects.all()
    serializer_class = UserSerializer

Answer 2

An update for this thread, in the latest versions of DRF there is actually a ChoiceField.

So all you need to do if you want to return the display_name is to subclass ChoiceField to_representation method like this:

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
from rest_framework import serializers

User = get_user_model()

class ChoiceField(serializers.ChoiceField):

    def to_representation(self, obj):
        if obj == '' and self.allow_blank:
            return obj
        return self._choices[obj]

    def to_internal_value(self, data):
        # To support inserts with the value
        if data == '' and self.allow_blank:
            return ''

        for key, val in self._choices.items():
            if val == data:
                return key
        self.fail('invalid_choice', input=data)


class UserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    gender = ChoiceField(choices=User.GENDER_CHOICES)

    class Meta:
        model = User

So there is no need to change the __init__ method or add any additional package.