How do I set different Serializer for list and det

Question

How do I set a different Serializer for list and detail view while using viewsets.ModelViewSet and HyperlinkedSerializer?

I see how to do it with viewsets.ViewSet by defining list and retrive, (here's an example) but I don't know how to elegantly adapt it to viewsets.ModelViewSet

Answer 1

I've adapted an answer from "Django rest framework, use different serializers in the same ModelViewSet" that serves me very well, and I hope you'll find useful:

class MyModelViewSet(viewsets.MyModelViewSet):

    queryset = MyModel.objects.all()
    serializer_class = MyModelListSerializer
    detail_serializer_class = MyModelDetailSerializer

    def get_serializer_class(self):
        if self.action == 'retrieve':
            if hasattr(self, 'detail_serializer_class'):
                return self.detail_serializer_class

        return super(MyModelViewSet, self).get_serializer_class()

In this case, you're just specifying your two serializers and using the one depending on the action. However, this can be made more general (for all actions) as follows:

class MyModelViewSet(viewsets.MyModelViewSet):

    queryset = MyModel.objects.all()
    serializer_class = MyModelSerializer

    action_serializers = {
        'retrieve': MyModelDetailSerializer,
        'list': MyModelListSerializer,
        'create': MyModelCreateSerializer
    }

    def get_serializer_class(self):

        if hasattr(self, 'action_serializers'):
            if self.action in self.action_serializers:
                return self.action_serializers[self.action]

        return super(MyModelViewSet, self).get_serializer_class()

Answer 2

Viewsets extend the class GenericAPIView, so you can use this part of the documentation to solve your problem. Basically, what you need is to override get_serializer_class and to return a different serializer based on your request.

Answer 3

I've created this small package for this job. drf_custom_viewsets.

It has CustomSerializerViewSet, which inherits from ModelViewSet, which lets you set different serializers for different actions.