Django: adding a second 'detailed' view for retrieving extra information

Question

I have set up my urls.py and views.py file to serialize my Projects model in two different ways: detailed information for the 'retrieve' action, and abbreviated information for the 'list' action.

This works well so far:

/projects/ = list of projects with abbreviated information
/projects/12 = detailed information about a specific project (id=12)

urls.py:

router.register(r'projects', ProjectViewSet, basename='project')

views.py

class ProjectViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):

    serializer_class = ProjectSerializerMini

    # Select a serializer according to the action (i.e.: 'retrieve' will
    # return a more detailed serialized data than 'list')
    action_serializers = {
        'retrieve': ProjectSerializerDetail,
        'list': ProjectSerializerList
    }

    def get_serializer_class(self):

        return self.action_serializers.get(self.action, self.serializer_class)

My question is: would it be possible, using the ViewSet framework, to summon a third serializer that would return, say, an even more detailed set of information.

Ex.: /projects/12/extradetail

The reason for this is that some of these records include geospatial data that is quite voluminous. I would only want to retrieve this extra detail in some cases

Answer 1

You can overwrite which serializer is used in each viewset

class ProjectViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    @action(detail=True, methods=['get'], serializer_class=SpecialSerializer)
    def special(self, request, pk=None):
        return super().retrieve(request, args, kwargs)
        

    def get_serializer_class(self):
        if self.action == 'list':
            return serializers.SimpleSerializer
        if self.action == 'retrieve':
            return serializers.DetailedSerializer
        return serializers.DefaultSerializer

in conjunction with this you can create custom actions with the @action decorator