Handling JSON Serialization of Custom Django Models with Nested Relationships
I've searched everywhere and can't find a clear answer. I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm updating my dependencies and I’m working on a Django application and I'm running into issues when trying to serialize a custom model that contains nested relationships. I've defined a model called `Author` that has a one-to-many relationship with another model called `Book`. When I try to serialize the `Author` instance using Django's built-in serializers, I'm getting a `TypeError: Object of type Book is not JSON serializable`. Here’s a simplified version of my models: ```python class Author(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=100) class Book(models.Model): title = models.CharField(max_length=200) author = models.ForeignKey(Author, related_name='books', on_delete=models.CASCADE) ``` I attempted to use Django's `serializers` like this: ```python from django.core import serializers author = Author.objects.get(id=1) serialized_author = serializers.serialize('json', [author]) ``` However, since the `books` field is nested and contains a queryset, it throws the behavior mentioned above. I also tried converting the `books` attribute to a list of dictionaries manually, but it seemed quite cumbersome and not very efficient: ```python books_list = [{'title': book.title} for book in author.books.all()] serialized_author = { 'name': author.name, 'books': books_list } ``` This works, but it feels like I'm reinventing the wheel since there must be a more robust way to handle this. Are there better practices or tools in Django for serializing models with nested relationships, especially for complex structures? Any tips or examples would be greatly appreciated! This is my first time working with Python stable. What's the best practice here? I'm using Python LTS in this project. How would you solve this? I recently upgraded to Python 3.9. I'm open to any suggestions. The project is a web app built with Python. Thanks for any help you can provide!