How can I control fields to include or exclude based on model's boolean field?

Using Django
1

I’ve got a model which has nearly ten fields and one of them is Boolean field.

class Person(models.Model):
first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
nick_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
be_anonymous = models.BooleanField(default=False)
character = models.ChoiceField(…)
…

I’ve got a ViewSet and serializers for this model and there’s an endpoint to get list of all Persons.
For some persons, be_anonymous is set to True and for those persons, I want to hide first_name and last_name from API response and instead include nick_name.

How can I hide/show those fields based on that Boolean field?

Any advice will be appreciated

2

My initial reaction would be that you could put that logic in your serializer. See Overriding serialization and deserialization behavior - the to_representation() method.

3

Hi, Ken!

Thanks for your answer!
I think that’s a correct approach, however, I am still curious to know how I can exclude those fields.
I can check out if the boolean field is set to True or False on to_representation method.
What is the best practice to exclude fields?

Thanks

4

I’d entertain the idea of creating a serializer that has all three fields, first_name, last_name, nick_name, then using serializers.SerializerMethodField for them to identify whether to return the value or None.

I like this approach because API has the same shape for all cases.

5

That sounds interesting but the api response will still have those keys with empty values, right?

6

Don’t look to make this more complicated than necessary.
The internal representation is probably going to be a Python dict (unless you’re doing something explicitly different) - so I would just check the boolean field and change the dict as desired. I wouldn’t worry about what someone considers “best practices” for this - at this layer of the code, no reasonable approach is going to be significantly different than any other.

1 Like
7

I will try that Ken, :smiley:

8

That is true - and there’s a lot to be said for doing it that way. It really depends upon what the client is going to expect from your response - either the field is missing or is present with a null value.

1 Like
9

Correct. That’s what I meant by “shape”. It depends on your clients’ expectations whether this would even be a viable approach.

1 Like
10

I got it, thank you. :slight_smile:

11

GMTA! :grinning:(with padding to make this post 20 characters.)

1 Like
12

It works like a charm. Very nice! :+1: