Django Rest Framework: Access item detail by slug instead of ID

Question

Is it possible to use a object\'s slug (or any other field) to access the details of an item, instead of using the ID?

For example, if I have an item with the slug \

Answer 1

You should set lookup_field in your serializer:

class ItemSerializer(serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Item
        fields = ('url', 'slug', 'title', 'item_url')
        lookup_field = 'slug'
        extra_kwargs = {
            'url': {'lookup_field': 'slug'}
        }

and in your view:

class ItemViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Item.objects.all()
    serializer_class = ItemSerializer
    lookup_field = 'slug'

I got this result:

~ curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/items/testslug/ | python -mjson.tool
{
    "item_url": "https://example.com/", 
    "slug": "testslug", 
    "title": "Test Title", 
    "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8000/items/testslug/"
}

Answer 2

In some scenarios you may want to have both the "low level" pk value and the more semantic slug. I like to have both options personally and do this by setting the lookup_field later in the viewset as_view() method in my urls.py.

Note: the following defaults to pk with an optional slug lookup. To combine this with previous answer you would change the lookup_field below to be "pk" instead of "slug".

from django.conf.urls import *
from rest_framework.urlpatterns import format_suffix_patterns

from myobjects import views as myviews


# simplify the view definitions by splitting out the options
REQDICT = {
    'get': 'retrieve',
    'put': 'update',
    'patch': 'partial_update',
    'delete': 'destroy'
}


# define the pk detail view
myobject_detail = myviews.MyObjectViewset.as_view(REQDICT)
# define the slug detail view
myobject_slug_detail = myviews.MyObjectViewset.as_view(REQDICT, lookup_field='slug')


urlpatterns = [
    url(r"^myobjects/(?P<pk>\d*)/$",
           myobject_detail,
           name = 'myobject-detail'),
    url(r"^myobjects/(?P<slug>[-\w]+)/$",
           myobject_slug_detail,
           name = 'myobject-slug-detail'),
]

urlpatterns = format_suffix_patterns(urlpatterns)

This could also be in your views.py - my preference is to see it beside the urlpatterns list.