Django Rest Framework how to post date field

Question

I want to post JSON request with field date:

{
    "date":"2015-02-11T00:00:00.000Z"
}

It's the string is automatically converted from Date object and I don't want to crop the part T00:00:00.000Z manually at frontend.

But if I post such request, Django Rest Framework validator of DateField will say me, that date has invalid format.

My model:

class Event(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField('Name', max_length=40, blank=True, null=True)
    date = models.DateField('Date', blank=True, null=True)

My serializer:

class EventSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Event
        fields = ('id', 'name', 'date')

What is the right way to solve this problem?

Answer 1

You can modify your date field in your serializer with a different format (different from the default one, which you are using implicitly).

More info:

https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/fields/#datefield

https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior

from rest_framework import serializers, fields


class EventSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    date = fields.DateField(input_formats=['%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ'])

    class Meta:
        model = Event
        fields = ('id', 'name', 'date')

Note that if you need to parse timestamps other than in UTC (Z at the end of your timestamp), you will need to customize DateField a bit more.

As @nitrovatter mentioned in the comments, the date input formats can also be configured in the settings to affect every serializer by default. For example:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DATE_INPUT_FORMATS': ['iso-8601', '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ'],
}