Passing argument from view to Custom RelatedField serializer - django-rest-framework

Question

How can I pass an argument to a serializers.RelatedField class from views.py. I need to pass language_id to query Language.objects model within that RelatedField.
I am not sure if I took a right approach to this issue. What I want to achieve is to present information about genres associated to a movie from database model about depending on the language. The MovieGenre model has genre ID field which I want to replace with actual Genre name.
My serialiser.py
class GenreField(serializers.RelatedField):
def to_representation(self, value, language_id=1):
genre_name = GenresVideo.objects.get(genre_id=value, language_id=language_id)
return genre_name.name
class MovieGenresSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
genre_id = GenreField(read_only=True)
class Meta:
model = MoviesGenres
As you see, here I query Language.objects with default value but I would like to pass it from views (language_id).
My views.py:
class MovieGenresTestViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
lookup_field = 'movie'
queryset = MoviesGenres.objects.all()
serializer_class = MovieGenresSerializer
def list(self, request, language_pk):
queryset = MoviesGenres.objects.all()
serializer = MovieGenresSerializer(queryset, many=True)
return Response(serializer.data)
def retrieve(self, request, movie, language_pk):
queryset = MoviesGenres.objects.filter(movie=movie)
serializer = MovieGenresSerializer(queryset, many=True)
return Response(serializer.data)
And my urls.py:
router.register(r'lang', LanguagesViewSet, base_name='lang')
mov_gen = routers.NestedSimpleRouter(router, r'lang', lookup='language')
mov_gen.register(r'mg', MovieGenresTestViewSet, base_name='mg')
url(r'^api/', include(genre_spec.urls))
My models.py
class Languages(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(unique=True, max_length=255)
short_name = models.CharField(unique=True, max_length=4, blank=True, null=True)
active = models.BooleanField(default="")
class Meta:
managed = False
db_table = 'languages'
ordering = ('id',)
class GenresVideo(models.Model):
genre_id = models.IntegerField()
language = models.ForeignKey('Languages')
name = models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=True, null=True)
class Meta:
managed = False
db_table = 'genres_video'
unique_together = (('genre_id', 'language'),)
ordering = ('genre_id',)
class MoviesGenres(models.Model):
movie = models.ForeignKey(Movies)
genre_id = models.IntegerField()
class Meta:
managed = False
db_table = 'movies_genres'
unique_together = (('movie', 'genre_id'),)
Through the urls routes, I can get a correct response from API including the language_id. I just need to pass it to the view somehow.
Thanks a lot for help!

Answer 1

I'll try to answer to your first question, with the easiest implementation possible: SerializerMethodField. Because we will get the language id via the context passed to the serializer, we should either generate the context for the serializer, or let the framework do that for us.
Now to the problem at hand: you aren't filtering the queryset (MoviesGenres) by language per se. Thus, we can avoid overwriting the list and retrieve methods. Nevertheless, the router mechanism will inject in kwargs for the view method the language_pk parameter - that's the parameter that we will retrieve from within the serializer context:
class MovieGenresSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
genre = searializers.SerializerMethodField()
class Meta:
model = MoviesGenres
def get_genre(self, instance):
# get the language id from the view kwargs
language_id = self.context['view'].kwargs['language_pk']
# get the genre
try:
genre_name = GenresVideo.objects.get(genre_id=instance.genre_id, language_id=language_id).name
except GenresVideo.DoesNotExist:
genre_name = None
# return the formatted output
return genre_name
class MovieGenresTestViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
lookup_field = 'movie'
queryset = MoviesGenres.objects.all()
serializer_class = MovieGenresSerializer