Serialize Objects with One-to-One Relationship Django

Question

I am a newbie in django. I am working on a rest api. I have an optional \"is a\" relationship i.e Student is a Employee. I am trying to serialize these 2 models such that I

Answer 1

The Django REST framework has some nice tools for serializing nested objects.

You need what they call a Nested Relationship. Like this -

from rest_framework import serializers

# define your models here ...

class EmployeeSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
  class Meta:
    model = Employee
    fields = ('full_name', 'email_id', 'mobile_no', 'is_job_ready', 'type', 'location_preference')

class StudentSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
  employee = EmployeeSerializer(read_only = True)

  class Meta:
    model = Student
    fields = ('college', 'year', 'is_with_college', 'employee')

Then, you can load your serializer and use it something like this -

from myapp.models import StudentSerializer

student = Student.objects.first()
serializer = StudentSerializer(student)

serializer.data
# { 'college': 'Naropa University',
#    'is_with_college': True,
#    'year': '2015'}
#    'employee': {
#      'full_name' : 'Chogyam Trungpa',
#      'email_id' : 'teacher@naropa.edu',
#      'mobile_no' : '555-555-5555',
#      'is_job_ready' : True,
#      'type' :'Teacher',
#      'location_preference' : 'Boulder, CO'
#    }
#  }