Django Rest Framework - Serialize multiple objects in a single object

Question

I'm trying to integrate support for an external library in my project. The external library requires a precise data structure that it uses to call response-as-a-table.

A simple serializer for my model, could be:

class BookSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Book
        fields = ('id', 'title', 'author')

So, supposing a snippet like this:

queryset = Book.objects.all()
serializer = BookSerializer(queryset, many=True)
serializer.data

Which gives this output:

[
    {'id': 0, 'title': 'The electric kool-aid acid test', 'author': 'Tom Wolfe'},
    {'id': 1, 'title': 'If this is a man', 'author': 'Primo Levi'},
    {'id': 2, 'title': 'The wind-up bird chronicle', 'author': 'Haruki Murakami'}
]

How should I reshape my BookSerializer class to achieve this result? I can't figure it out.

{
    'id': [0, 1, 2],
    'title': ['The electric kool-aid acid test', 'If this is a man', 'The wind-up bird chronicle'],
    'author': ['Tom Wolfe', 'Primo Levi', 'Haruki Murakami']
}

Why do you want this behavior? Looks like you can do that in your view just by building your dict by iterating on queryset and not using serializers. But I am not sure that is a good way. — Chiefir
– Chiefir, Commented Oct 11, 2018 at 11:17
I need this behavior because a plotting library requires this data structure :( — Manuel Fedele
– Manuel Fedele, Commented Oct 11, 2018 at 11:17
@MilesDavis As Chiefir mentioned, you could do it in the view level. — JPG
– JPG, Commented Oct 11, 2018 at 12:18

Dmitry M · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-11 14:52:02Z

1

Override the serializer's to_representation to reshape of the output dict however you want. DRF does not have such a utility, but you could easily achieve this with pandas. For example:

import pandas as pd

def to_representation(self, instance):
    data = super(BookSerializer, self).to_representation(instance)
    df = pd.DataFrame(data=data)
    reshaped_data = df.to_dict(orient='list')
    return reshaped_data

Note that now the shape of the data will not work if you want to use this serializer as part of a view.

answered Oct 11, 2018 at 14:52

Dmitry M

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