Django: Serialize a model with a many-to-many relationship with a through argument

Question

The model defines an Article and an Author classes. They are linked together with a many-to-many relationship. This relationship is defined through an custom intermediary table:

# models.py
class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=500)
    authors = models.ManyToManyField(Author, through='AuthorOrder')

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)

class AuthorOrder(models.Model):
    author = models.ForeignKey(Author)
    article = models.ForeignKey(Article)
    writing_order = models.IntegerField()

The serialization should return a JSON like this:

#articles_json
{"fields":
     {
         "title": "A title",
         "authors": [
             {
                 "name":"Author 1",
                 "writing_order": 1
             },
             {
                 "name":"Author 2",
                 "writing_order": 2
             }
         }
     }
}

I've identified two solutions.

• This one suggests to serialize the AuthorOrder field separately.
• The second one is to use the Django Rest Framework.

I tried the twos but without success. Do you know another way to do it?

Answer 1

Thanks to your feedback, I focused on Django REST framework and it works. Here are the custom serializers I've written:

# serializers.py
from rest_framework import serializers
from app.models import Article, AuthorsOrder


class AuthorsOrderSerializer(serializer.ModelSerializer):
    author_name = serializers.ReadOnlyField(source='author.name')

    class Meta:
        model = AuthorsOrder
        fields = ('writing_order', 'author_name')


class ArticleSerializer(serializer.ModelSerializer):
    authors = AuthorsOrderSerializer(source='authorsorder_set', many=True)

    class Meta:
        model = Article
        fields = ('title', 'authors')

Sources:

1. Include intermediary (through model) in responses in Django Rest Framework
2. https://bitbucket.org/snippets/adautoserpa/MeLa/django-rest-framework-manytomany-through