Overriding DRF ListAPIView list() method

Question

I have a DRF Project, which has a ListAPIView for a model called Category. This model, has a ForeginKey to itself named parent_category and with related name of subcategories. I want my URLs to behave like this:

1. get a list of Categories with no parent: example.com/api/categories
2. get a list of subcategories of an object with some id: example.com/api/categories/{id_here}

models.py:

class Category(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    parent_category = models.ForeignKey('self', null=True, blank=True, on_delete=models.CASCADE,
                                        related_name='subcategories')

views.py:

class CategoryList(generics.ListAPIView):
    queryset = Category.objects.all()
    serializer_class = CategorySerializer

And I have no idea how to write my urls.py. Do I need DRF routers? or Django path works fine? I don't know which to choose or how to use them for this project. I thought if I override ListAPIMixin's list() method, it would work, but I don't even know what to write in that.

Answer 1

I made a dummy project for myself and implemented it like this

You can do this by rewriting get_queryset

example code

views

from .models import Category
from rest_framework.generics import ListAPIView
from .serializers import CategorySerializer


class CategoryViewSet(ListAPIView):
    serializer_class = CategorySerializer
    def get_queryset(self):    
        parent_category = self.kwargs.get("parent_category") or None
        return Category.objects.filter(parent_category=parent_category)

urls

you can set multiple-routes option

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path
from cate.views import CategoryViewSet

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('', CategoryViewSet.as_view() ,name="category"),
    path('<int:parent_category>/', CategoryViewSet.as_view() ,name="category"),
    
]

Serializers

from .models import Category
from rest_framework import serializers


class CategorySerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Category
        fields = "__all__"

also see DRF-Filtering Maybe it will be useful for you