Django values get year from DateTimeField

Question

I have a page where users can search for other users. The search is called with AJAX and the results are returned using JSON with the following code:

return HttpResponse(json.dumps({'users': list(users.values('first_name', 'last_name', 'gender', 'zip_code__city', 'zip_code__state')) }))

I have the users birthday stored in the model with birthday = models.DateTimeField(). I am trying to return just the year of the birthday with the results, but I am having trouble. Returning the whole date would work as well as I can always parse out the year later.

When I try just adding 'birthday' to the arguments in values, I get an error that it is not JSON serializable. I also tried 'birthday__year', but that returned an error that there was no such thing as 'year'.

How do I get the DateTimeField into the list?

Answer 1

Build a models.py method to return the year:

models.py

from django.db import models

class MyModel(models.Model):
  birthday = models.DateTimeField()

  def get_year(self):
    return self.birthday.year

Then call this function from your views.py