Django REST framework serializer without a model

django django-rest-framework django-serializer
Farid El Nasire picture Farid El Nasire · Aug 6, 2017 · Viewed 28.8k times · Source

I'm working on a couple endpoints which aggregate data. One of the endpoints will for example return an array of objects, each object corresponding with a day, and it'll have the number of comments, likes and photos that specific user posted. This object has a predefined/set schema, but we do not store it in the database, so it doesn't have a model.

Is there a way I can still use Django serializers for these objects without having a model?

Answer

codeadict picture codeadict · Aug 6, 2017

You can create a serializer that inherits from serializers.Serializer and pass your data as the first parameter like:

serializers.py

from rest_framework import serializers

class YourSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
   """Your data serializer, define your fields here."""
   comments = serializers.IntegerField()
   likes = serializers.IntegerField()

views.py

from rest_framework import views
from rest_framework.response import Response

from .serializers import YourSerializer

class YourView(views.APIView):

    def get(self, request):
        yourdata= [{"likes": 10, "comments": 0}, {"likes": 4, "comments": 23}]
        results = YourSerializer(yourdata, many=True).data
        return Response(results)

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