Why StringRelatedField is read_only?

[weber-s]

Hello !

I wonder why a StringRelatedField is read only.

class StringRelatedField(RelatedField):
    """
    A read only field that represents its targets using their
    plain string representation.
    """

    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        kwargs['read_only'] = True
        super().__init__(**kwargs)

    def to_representation(self, value):
        return str(value)

but why? I needed to empty one StringRelatedField, and the solution was to go back to a ForeignKeyRelatedField, which ok for the update, but "ugly" for the get...

[tomchristie]

Because there's no way to take a string, and lookup which instance would return that string.

[weber-s]

Ok, make sens for the lookup... Didn't think about that since I only wanted to delete it.
Thanks!