Serialize Objects with One-to-One Relationship Django

Question

I am a newbie in django. I am working on a rest api. I have an optional "is a" relationship i.e Student is a Employee. I am trying to serialize these 2 models such that I get combined json result. Please let me know if anyone can help me with this. Thanks

class Employee(models.Model):
    full_name=models.CharField(max_length=100,blank=True)
    email_id=models.EmailField(max_length=100,blank=True)
    mobile_no=models.CharField(max_length=11,blank=True)
    is_job_ready=models.BooleanField(False)
    type=models.CharField(max_length=20,blank=True)
    location_preference=models.CharField(max_length=20,blank=True)

class Student(models.Model):
    college=models.CharField(max_length=100)
    year=models.CharField(max_length=20)
    is_with_college=models.BooleanField()
    employee=models.OneToOneField(Employee,primary_key=True)

Answer 1

The Django REST framework has some nice tools for serializing nested objects.

You need what they call a Nested Relationship. Like this -

from rest_framework import serializers

# define your models here ...

class EmployeeSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
  class Meta:
    model = Employee
    fields = ('full_name', 'email_id', 'mobile_no', 'is_job_ready', 'type', 'location_preference')

class StudentSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
  employee = EmployeeSerializer(read_only = True)

  class Meta:
    model = Student
    fields = ('college', 'year', 'is_with_college', 'employee')

Then, you can load your serializer and use it something like this -

from myapp.models import StudentSerializer

student = Student.objects.first()
serializer = StudentSerializer(student)

serializer.data
# { 'college': 'Naropa University',
#    'is_with_college': True,
#    'year': '2015'}
#    'employee': {
#      'full_name' : 'Chogyam Trungpa',
#      'email_id' : '[email protected]',
#      'mobile_no' : '555-555-5555',
#      'is_job_ready' : True,
#      'type' :'Teacher',
#      'location_preference' : 'Boulder, CO'
#    }
#  }

Answer 2

You can go with @metahamza way, or use depth keyword refer docs here

Specifying nested serialization The default ModelSerializer uses primary keys for relationships, but you can also easily generate nested representations using the depth option:

class AccountSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Account
        fields = ['id', 'account_name', 'users', 'created']
        depth = 1

The depth option should be set to an integer value that indicates the depth of relationships that should be traversed before reverting to a flat representation.