This is related to the question : Assymetric nature of GET and POST in a Django REST framework Serializer . I've put it as a fresh question, instead of putting more questions in that thread, accordingly to SO guidelines
I am writing a Viewset and a ModelSerializer for the User model to provide a /user endpoint
GET - returns list and information about all users, in the standard DRF way
POST - all I want the client to post is the facebook access_token (hence have put all other fields as read_only in serializer. The pre_save() in ViewSet is wired to use this access token and it uses django-facebook to pull data from facebook api (using access token) and automatically create a new user with that information. Since this new user is created automatically, I want to suppress the normal DRF flow during POST and not create another user via DRF. How do i do this?
views.py
from open_facebook import OpenFacebook
from django_facebook.api import FacebookUserConverter
from django_facebook.connect import connect_user
class UserViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
queryset = models.User.objects.all()
serializer_class = UserSerializer
def pre_save(self, obj):
access_token = obj.access_token
facebook = OpenFacebook(access_token)
conv = FacebookUserConverter(facebook)
action, user = connect_user(self.request, access_token)
# this creates an entire new row, just as required, in the variable "user", so all I want to do is suppress any other row creation in the standard POST method. connect_user fills in data like first_name, last_name, etc from facebook already, and that is exactly what I need to do.
conv.get_and_store_friends(user)
obj = user
user.delete()
# I am trying to do that by copying user to obj and deleting user, but at the end of it i
print obj.username
serializers.py
class UserSerializer(serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
"""
User Serializer
"""
class Meta:
model = models.User
fields = ('id', 'username', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'activities', 'image_url', 'url', 'access_token')
read_only_fields = ('username', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'image_url', 'activities') #todo: find out a shortcut to invert selection
# show activities with user details rather than separately to remove an extra server call
depth = 1
using the create() function of ModelViewSet worked, instead of pre_save - to suppress saving the object