How to set current user to user field in Django Rest Framework?

Question

I have the following code working perfectly. I can create a Post object from DRF panel by selecting an image and a user. However I want DRF to populate the user

Answer 1

You will have to override the default behavior of how generics.ListCreateAPIView creates an object.

class PhotoListAPIView(generics.ListCreateAPIView):
    queryset = Post.objects.filter(hidden=False)
    authentication_classes = (SessionAuthentication, BasicAuthentication)
    permission_classes = (IsAuthenticated,)

    def get_serializer_class(self):
        if self.request.method == 'POST':
            return CreatePostSerializer
        else:
            return ListPostSerializer

    def create(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        # Copy parsed content from HTTP request
        data = request.data.copy()

        # Add id of currently logged user
        data['user'] = request.user.id

        # Default behavior but pass our modified data instead
        serializer = self.get_serializer(data=data)
        serializer.is_valid(raise_exception=True)
        self.perform_create(serializer)
        headers = self.get_success_headers(serializer.data)
        return Response(serializer.data, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED, headers=headers)

The .get_serializer_class() is not necessary as you can specify which fields are read-only from your serializer, but based on the projects I have worked on, I usually end up with 'asymmetric' serializers, i.e. different serializers depending on the intended operation.