Skip to content

Clarify read-only & unique_together Documentation #2204

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
merged 7 commits into from
Dec 5, 2014
Merged
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
27 changes: 20 additions & 7 deletions docs/api-guide/serializers.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -104,7 +104,7 @@ If your object instances correspond to Django models you'll also want to ensure
instance.created = validated_data.get('created', instance.created)
instance.save()
return instance

Now when deserializing data, we can call `.save()` to return an object instance, based on the validated data.

comment = serializer.save()
Expand All @@ -113,7 +113,7 @@ Calling `.save()` will either create a new instance, or update an existing insta

# .save() will create a new instance.
serializer = CommentSerializer(data=data)

# .save() will update the existing `comment` instance.
serializer = CommentSerializer(comment, data=data)

Expand All @@ -140,7 +140,7 @@ For example:
class ContactForm(serializers.Serializer):
email = serializers.EmailField()
message = serializers.CharField()

def save(self):
email = self.validated_data['email']
message = self.validated_data['message']
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -230,7 +230,7 @@ Serializer classes can also include reusable validators that are applied to the
name = serializers.CharField()
room_number = serializers.IntegerField(choices=[101, 102, 103, 201])
date = serializers.DateField()

class Meta:
# Each room only has one event per day.
validators = UniqueTogetherValidator(
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -448,7 +448,7 @@ To do so, open the Django shell, using `python manage.py shell`, then import the
id = IntegerField(label='ID', read_only=True)
name = CharField(allow_blank=True, max_length=100, required=False)
owner = PrimaryKeyRelatedField(queryset=User.objects.all())

## Specifying which fields should be included

If you only want a subset of the default fields to be used in a model serializer, you can do so using `fields` or `exclude` options, just as you would with a `ModelForm`.
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -505,6 +505,19 @@ This option should be a list or tuple of field names, and is declared as follows

Model fields which have `editable=False` set, and `AutoField` fields will be set to read-only by default, and do not need to be added to the `read_only_fields` option.

---

**Note**: There is a special-case where a read-only field is part of a `unique_together` constraint at the model level. Here you **must** specify the field explicitly and provide a valid default value.

A common example of this is a read-only relation to the currently authenticated `User` which is `unique_together` with another identifier. In this case you would declare the user field like so:

user = serializers.PrimaryKeyRelatedField(read_only=True, default=serializers.CurrentUserDefault())

Please review the [Validators Documentation](/api-guide/validators/) for details on the [UniqueTogetherValidator](/api-guide/validators/#uniquetogethervalidator) and [CurrentUserDefault](/api-guide/validators/#currentuserdefault) classes.

---


## Specifying additional keyword arguments for fields.

There is also a shortcut allowing you to specify arbitrary additional keyword arguments on fields, using the `extra_kwargs` option. Similarly to `read_only_fields` this means you do not need to explicitly declare the field on the serializer.
Expand All @@ -516,7 +529,7 @@ This option is a dictionary, mapping field names to a dictionary of keyword argu
model = User
fields = ('email', 'username', 'password')
extra_kwargs = {'password': {'write_only': True}}

def create(self, validated_data):
user = User(
email=validated_data['email'],
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -656,7 +669,7 @@ To support multiple updates you'll need to do so explicitly. When writing your m
* How do you determine which instance should be updated for each item in the list of data?
* How should insertions be handled? Are they invalid, or do they create new objects?
* How should removals be handled? Do they imply object deletion, or removing a relationship? Should they be silently ignored, or are they invalid?
* How should ordering be handled? Does changing the position of two items imply any state change or is it ignored?
* How should ordering be handled? Does changing the position of two items imply any state change or is it ignored?

Here's an example of how you might choose to implement multiple updates:

Expand Down