Django-mptt model serialize with Django REST framework

Question

I have used django-mptt to store categories hierarchy and I need to serialize all category data in below format.

{
            "id": 1,
            "name": "FOOD"
            "children": [
                {
                    "id": 6,
                    "name": "PIZZA"
                },
                {
                    "id": 7,
                    "name": "BURGER"
                }
            ],

        },
        {
            "id": 2,
            "name": "ALCOHOL"
            "children": [
                {
                    "id": 8,
                    "name": "WINE"
                },
                {
                    "id": 9,
                    "name": "VODKA"
                }
            ],

        },
}

I'm using django REST framework ModelViewset and serializers. How to do so?

Answer 1

This response is a year too late, but for the benefit of others, use RecursiveField from the djangorestframework-recursive package, which can be installed via:

pip3 install djangorestframework-recursive

I was able to do it like so:

from rest_framework_recursive.fields import RecursiveField

class MyModelRecursiveSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
    # your other fields

    children = serializers.ListField(
        read_only=True, source='your_get_children_method', child=RecursiveField()
    ) 

Just be aware that this is potentially expensive, so you might want to only use this for models whose entries do not change that often and cache the results.