How To Use DRF Serializers Effectively in Django

Using the source argument, SerializerMethodField, and to_representation

Django REST framework serializers

This post assumes a basic familiarity with the Django REST framework.

We will discuss how we can effectively use serializers during read operations. We will look at three powerful features that will help us achieve the desired results with less code.

We will discuss:

• Multiple ways of using the serializer’s source argument.
• How and when to use SerializerMethodField.
• How and when to use to_representation.

How To Use the Source Keyword Argument

The DRF serializer provides a keyword argument, called source, which is extremely smart and can help avoid a lot of common patterns.

Let’s write a serializer that can create serialized representations of a User.

Let’s use this serializer to serialize a user:

In [1]: from accounts.serializers import UserSerializer
In [2]: from django.contrib.auth.models import User
In [3]: user = User.objects.latest('pk')
In [4]: serializer = UserSerializer(user)
In [5]: serializer.data
Out[5]: {'username': 'akshar', 'email': 'akshar@agiliq.com', 'first_name': '', 'last_name': ''}

Suppose the front end or mobile app consuming this API wants the key to be user_name instead of username in the serialized representation.

We can add a CharField on the serializer with a source attribute to achieve this.