Pfthb

I feel like this is a super basic question but am having trouble finding the answer in the DRF docs.

Let's say I have a models.py set up like so:

#models.py
class Person(models.Model):
 name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
 address = models.CharField(max_length=20)

class House(models.Model):
 name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
 owner = models.ForeignKey(Person)

And I have a ModelSerializer set up like so:

#serializers.py
class House(serializers.ModelSerializer):
 class Meta:
 model = House
 fields = '__all__'

What I want to do is to be able to POST new House objects but instead of having to supply the pk of the Person object, I want to be able to supply the name of the Person object.

E.g.

post = 'name': 'Blue House', 'owner': 'Timothy'

The actual models I'm using have several ForeignKey fields so I want to know the most canonical way of doing this.

One solution may be to use a SlugRelatedField

#serializers.py
class House(serializers.ModelSerializer):
 owner = serializers.SlugRelatedField(
 slug_field="name", queryset=Person.objects.all(),
 )
 class Meta:
 model = House
 fields = '__all__'

This will also change the representation of your serializer though, so it will display the Person's name when you render it. If you need to render the Person's primary key then you could either override the House serializers to_representation() method, or you could implement a small custom serializer field by inheriting SlugRelatedField and overriding to_representation() on that instead.

Change your serializer as below by overriding the create() method

class House(serializers.ModelSerializer):
 owner = serializers.CharField()

 class Meta:
 model = House
 fields = '__all__'

 def create(self, validated_data):
 owner = validated_data['owner']
 person_instance = Person.objects.get(owner=owner)
 return House.objects.create(owner=person_instance, **validated_data)