Allow hyphens in Django Rest Framework serializer field names

Question

Given an OpenAPI specification that I'm writing code against that requires hyphen-case (aka kebab-case) variable names in request bodies, how should this be handled when using Django Rest Framework?

For example, a request POST /thing to create a Thing has this body:

{
    "owner-type": "platform"
}

But in Python, owner-type is not a valid variable name ("SyntaxError: can't assign to operator"), so instead Thing has owner_type in the model definition:

class Thing(models.Model):
    owner_type = models.CharField(max_length=8)

But now the ThingSerializer is problematic because, again, owner-type is an illegal name. This is not allowed:

    owner-type = serializers.CharField(...)

I've tried to override how the names are generated in the ModelSerializer by trying to adjust the field names generated by get_fields(), but it failed. Here's my serializer:

class ThingSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Thing
        fields = [
            'owner_type',
        ]

    def get_fields(self):
        fields = super().get_fields()
        out_fields = OrderedDict()
        for field_name, field in fields.items():
            out_fields[field_name.replace('_', '-')] = field
        return out_fields

And the error:

../venv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/rest_framework/fields.py:453: in get_attribute
    return get_attribute(instance, self.source_attrs)
../venv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/rest_framework/fields.py:101: in get_attribute
    instance = getattr(instance, attr)
E   AttributeError: 'Thing' object has no attribute 'owner-type'

So my question - how can I configure a DRF model serializer to allow a model's fields that contain underscore to be serialized / deserialized so that the API client sees hyphens instead of underscores? This would be a generic solution to the example above where Thing.owner_type should be read / writeable by passing the field "owner-type" in the JSON body.

I'm using latest Django and DRF on Python 3.6.

Edit 1: Clarified that ideally this would be a generic solution that translates underscores to hyphens.

Answer 1

You can define field name with hyphen in fields and map it to correct django model field by defining source attribute in extra_kwargs - see https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/serializers/#additional-keyword-arguments

To answer you question you define ThingSerializer as bellow:

class ThingSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Thing
        fields = [
            'owner-type',
        ]
        extra_kwargs = {
            'owner-type': {'source': 'owner_type'},
        }

Answer 2

You can use the to_internal_value of Django(See in DJango Serializer fields) to get the key with the hyphens and rename it.

Example:

class Thing(models.Model):
    owner_type = models.CharField(max_length=8)
    
    def to_internal_value(self, data):
        data['owner_type'] = data['owner-type']
        data.pop('owner-type', None)
        return data