How to return custom data with Access and Refresh Tokens to identify users in Django Rest Framework simple JWT?

Question

In Django, superuser can add more user according to their roll. I'm using simple JWT with DRF for authentication. But it is impossible to detect the type of user only by seeing the Access and Refresh Tokens.

Here are my settings.py file

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': ('rest_framework.permissions.IsAuthenticated',),
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': ('rest_framework_simplejwt.authentication.JWTAuthentication',),


}

urls.py

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
from rest_framework_simplejwt.views import TokenObtainPairView, TokenRefreshView


urlpatterns = [

    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('', include('Manage_Merchants.urls')),

    path('api-auth', include('rest_framework.urls')),
    path('api/token/', TokenObtainPairView.as_view(), name='token_obtain_pair'),
    path('api/token/refresh/', TokenRefreshView.as_view(), name='token_refresh'),


]

when I hit on 127.0.0.1:8000/api/token/ through Postman it asks for username and password. When I put Username and Password it generates a Refresh and Access Token. Generate JWT with DRF using Postman

So how can I identify the token is generated for super user or other user created bu superuser? How can I pass more value as a dictionary along with Access and Refresh Tokens to identify the type of user?

Answer 1

In the version djangorestframework-simplejwt==4.4.0 it's the method validate instead of to_representation, meaning:

In your serializer.py you need to override the TokenObtainPairSerializer in order to include all the data you want to send in the response

from rest_framework_simplejwt.serializers import TokenObtainPairSerializer


class CustomTokenObtainPairSerializer(TokenObtainPairSerializer):
    def validate(self, attrs):
        # The default result (access/refresh tokens)
        data = super(CustomTokenObtainPairSerializer, self).validate(attrs)
        # Custom data you want to include
        data.update({'user': self.user.username})
        data.update({'id': self.user.id})
        # and everything else you want to send in the response
        return data

Now in your views.py you need to override the TokenObtainPairView in order to pair it with the new serializer.

from .serializers import CustomTokenObtainPairSerializer


class CustomTokenObtainPairView(TokenObtainPairView):
    # Replace the serializer with your custom
    serializer_class = CustomTokenObtainPairSerializer

Now map your it in your url.py

from rest_framework_simplejwt.views import TokenRefreshView, TokenVerifyView
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    # This one now has the custom view mapped with the custom serializer that includes the desired data
    path('token/', views.CustomTokenObtainPairView.as_view(), name='token_obtain_pair'),
    path('token/refresh/', TokenRefreshView.as_view(), name='token_refresh'),
    path('token/verify/', TokenVerifyView.as_view(), name='token_verify')
]