drf-nested-resources

This is a django rest framework extension to allow developers to create nested resources.

How to use

Configuration of nested resources

For this example we are going to create a simple API with the following endpoints:

/developers/
/developers/<id>
/developers/<id>/languages/
/developers/<id>/languages/<id>

First we start with the following Django models:

from django.db.models import CASCADE
from django.db.models.base import Model
from django.db.models.fields import CharField
from django.db.models.fields.related import ForeignKey


class Developer(Model):

    name = CharField(max_length=20)


class ProgrammingLanguage(Model):

    name = CharField(max_length=20)

    author = ForeignKey(
        Developer, 
        related_name='programming_languages', 
        on_delete=CASCADE,
    )

We will have the two viewsets for both the developers and languages resource collections.

from rest_framework.viewsets import ModelViewSet
from drf_nested_resources.fields import HyperlinkedNestedModelSerializer


class _DeveloperSerializer(HyperlinkedNestedModelSerializer):

    class Meta(object):

        model = Developer

        fields = ('url', 'name', 'programming_languages')


class DeveloperViewSet(ModelViewSet):

    queryset = Developer.objects.all()

    serializer_class = _DeveloperSerializer


class _ProgrammingLanguageSerializer(HyperlinkedNestedModelSerializer):

    class Meta(object):

        model = ProgrammingLanguage

        fields = ('url', 'name', 'author')


class ProgrammingLanguageViewSet(ModelViewSet):

    queryset = ProgrammingLanguage.objects.all()

    serializer_class = _ProgrammingLanguageSerializer

The related fields in the ViewSets author and programming_languages should follow the model representation so that author will give us a url for the developer who wrote the ProgrammingLanguage and the programming_languages should give us a list of urls for the ProgrammingLanguages that the Developer wrote.

This is how you would generate the urlpatterns for them:

_RESOURCES = [
    Resource(
        'developer',
        'developers',
        DeveloperViewSet,
        [
            NestedResource(
                'language',
                'languages',
                ProgrammingLanguageViewSet,
                parent_field_lookup='author',
                )
            ],
        ),
    ]
urlpatterns = make_urlpatterns_from_resources(_RESOURCES)

For more examples of different relationships and authorization check the test suite.