serializing-models.md

Serializing the model

Let's provide an example of how the serialize method is used in your Django models:

from shared.abstractmodel import AbstractModel, serialization
from django.db import models

class Author(AbstractModel):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

class Book(AbstractModel):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    author = models.ForeignKey(Author, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

    @property
    def serializers(self):
        return {
            'title': True,
            'author': {
                'name': True,  # Include the 'name' attribute of the Author model
            },
        }

In this example, we have two models: Author and Book. The Book model has a foreign key relationship with the Author model. To customize the serialization structure, we define the serializers property for the Book model.

Within the serializers, we specify how we want the Book model to be serialized:

• The 'title' field is set to True, which means it will be included in the serialized data.
• The 'author' field is defined with a custom structure. In this custom structure, we include the 'name' attribute of the related Author model.

Now, when you use the serialize method on an instance of the Book model, it will serialize the data based on the specified structure. For example:

book_instance = Book.objects.first()  # Get an instance of the Book model

# Serialize the 'book_instance' using the specified structure
serialized_data = book_instance.serialize()

# 'serialized_data' will contain the 'title' and 'author' attributes
# with the 'name' attribute of the related Author model

This way, you can control which attributes of the related models are included in the serialized data. This allows you to customize the serialization output to meet the specific needs of your application.