Django rest framework custom serialization

I think that it is better to have same structure in both server and client. You can create a class with x,y members named "Inner" and "inner" can be foreign key member in your original class.

To answer the question, you can override create function:

class InnerSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Inner
        fields = ('x', 'y')


class CostumeSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    inner = InnerSerializer()

    class Meta:
        model = MyModel
        fields = ('code', 'inner')

    def create(self, validated_data):
        inner = validated_data.pop('inner')
        return MyModel.objects.create(inner_x=inner.get('x', None), inner_y=inner.get('y', None), **validated_data)

• This is example code - I didn't run it

EDIT: Take a look here

You can define the InnerSerializer with no model like this:

from rest_framework import serializers

class CommentSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
    email = serializers.EmailField()
    content = serializers.CharField(max_length=200)
    created = serializers.DateTimeField()

Are you looking for something like this?

Where you overreide .to_internal_value() for deserialization and .to_representation() for serialization.