Dynamic Serializer Fields for Django REST Framework

This package provides a mixin that allows the user to dynamically select only a subset of fields per resource.

Installing

pip install drf-dynamic-fields

What It Does

Example serializer:

class IdentitySerializer(DynamicFieldsMixin, serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = models.Identity
        fields = ('id', 'url', 'type', 'data')

A regular request returns all fields:

GET /identities

[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "url": "http://localhost:8000/api/identities/1/",
    "type": 5,
    "data": "John Doe"
  },
  ...
]

A query with the fields parameter on the other hand returns only a subset of the fields:

GET /identities/?fields=id,data

[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "data": "John Doe"
  },
  ...
]

And a query with the omit parameter excludes specified fields.

GET /identities/?omit=data

[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "url": "http://localhost:8000/api/identities/1/",
    "type": 5
  },
  ...
]

You can use both fields and omit in the same request!

GET /identities/?omit=data,fields=data,id

[
  {
    "id": 1
  },
  ...
]

Though why you would want to do something like that is beyond this author.

It also works on single objects!

GET /identities/1/?fields=id,data

{
  "id": 1,
  "data": "John Doe"
}

Usage

When defining a serializer, use the DynamicFieldsMixin:

from drf_dynamic_fields import DynamicFieldsMixin

class IdentitySerializer(DynamicFieldsMixin, serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = models.Identity
        fields = ('id', 'url', 'type', 'data')

The mixin needs access to the request object. Some DRF classes like the ModelViewSet set that by default, but if you handle serializers yourself, pass in the request through the context:

events = Event.objects.all()
serializer = EventSerializer(events, many=True, context={'request': request})

Testing

To run tests, install Django and DRF and then run runtests.py:

$ python runtests.py

Credits

• The implementation is based on this StackOverflow answer. Thanks YAtOff!
• The GitHub users X17 and rawbeans provided improvements on my gist that were incorporated into this library. Thanks!
• For other contributors, please see Github contributor stats.

License

MIT license, see LICENSE file.