Return results from multiple models with Django REST Framework

aendrew picture aendrew · Sep 9, 2013 · Viewed 18.8k times · Source

I have three models — articles, authors and tweets. I'm ultimately needing to use Django REST Framework to construct a feed that aggregates all the objects using the Article and Tweet models into one reverse chronological feed.

Any idea how I'd do that? I get the feeling I need to create a new serializer, but I'm really not sure.

Thanks!

Edit: Here's what I've done thus far.

app/serializers.py:

class TimelineSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
    pk = serializers.Field()
    title = serializers.CharField()
    author = serializers.RelatedField()
    pub_date = serializers.DateTimeField()

app/views.py:

class TimelineViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    """
    API endpoint that lists all tweet/article objects in rev-chrono.
    """
    queryset = itertools.chain(Tweet.objects.all(), Article.objects.all())
    serializer_class = TimelineSerializer

Answer

David Jones - iPushPull picture David Jones - iPushPull · Sep 9, 2013

It looks pretty close to me. I haven't used ViewSets in DRF personally, but I think if you change your code to this you should get somewhere (sorry - not tested either of these):

class TimelineViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    """
    API endpoint that lists all tweet/article objects in rev-chrono.
    """
    def list(self, request):
        queryset = list(itertools.chain(Tweet.objects.all(), Article.objects.all()))
        serializer = TimelineSerializer(queryset, many=True)
        return Response(serializer.data)

If you're not wedded to using a ViewSet then a generics.ListAPIView would be a little simpler:

class TimeLineList(generics.ListAPIView):
    serializer_class = TimeLineSerializer

    def get_queryset(self):
        return list(itertools.chain(Tweet.objects.all(), Article.objects.all()))

Note you have to convert the output of chain to a list for this to work.