Serialise choice text for IntegerField with choices

Question

I'd like to serialise a model with a lot of choices like such:

class House(models.Model):
ACCESSIBILITY_CHOICES = (
    (ACCESSIBILITY_FULL, 'Full'),
    (ACCESSIBILITY_PARTIAL, 'Partial'),
    (ACCESSIBILITY_NONE, 'None')
)

accessibility = models.IntegerField(max_length=1, choices=ACCESSIBILITY_CHOICES, null=True)

I love that the default serializer such as:

class HouseView(generics.ListCreateAPIView):
    model = House
    serializer_class = HouseSerializer

class HouseSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    class Meta:
        model = House

works great if I want just the integer value

{accessibility:1}

However, what I'd like to get

{accessibility:'Full'}

Help is kindly appreciated. Many thanks.

Answer 1

You can get a read-only serializer field with the verbose value of a model field with choices through the get_FOO_display method. This method is added automatically when setting choices on a field. You can set that method as the source for a character field.

For endpoints that also support writing data, I would recommend to add the "normal" field, and another read-only field with the _name extension.

In your example, the following should produce the output you are looking for. The accessibility_name is read-only, while the accessibility is there to allow writing / updating values.

class HouseSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    accessibility_name = serializers.CharField(source='get_accessibility_display')

    class Meta:
        model = House
        fields = ('accessibility', 'accessibility_name', )