Tastypie Cookbook

Adding Custom Values

You might encounter cases where you wish to include additional data in a response which is not obtained from a field or method on your model. You can easily extend the dehydrate() method to provide additional values:

class MyModelResource(Resource):
    class Meta:
        qs = MyModel.objects.all()

    def dehydrate(self, bundle):
        bundle.data['custom_field'] = "Whatever you want"
        return bundle

Using Your Resource In Regular Views

In addition to using your resource classes to power the API, you can also use them to write other parts of your application, such as your views. For instance, if you wanted to encode user information in the page for some Javascript’s use, you could do the following:

# views.py
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from myapp.api.resources import UserResource


def user_detail(request, username):
    ur = UserResource()
    user = ur.obj_get_detail(username=username)

    # Other things get prepped to go into the context then...

    return render_to_response('myapp/user_detail.html', {
        # Other things here.
        "user_json": ur.serialize(None, ur.full_dehydrate(obj=user), 'application/json'),
    })

Using Non-PK Data For Your URLs

By convention, ModelResource``s usually expose the detail endpoints utilizing the primary key of the ``Model they represent. However, this is not a strict requirement. Each URL can take other named URLconf parameters that can be used for the lookup.

For example, if you want to expose User resources by username, you can do something like the following:

# myapp/api/resources.py
class UserResource(ModelResource):
    class Meta:
        queryset = User.objects.all()

    def override_urls(self):
        return [
            url(r"^(?P<resource_name>%s)/(?P<username>[\w\d_.-]+)/$" % self._meta.resource_name, self.wrap_view('dispatch_detail'), name="api_dispatch_detail"),
        ]

The added URLconf matches before the standard URLconf included by default & matches on the username provided in the URL.

You can also do “nested resources” (resources within another related resource) by lightly overriding the dispatch method in a similar way:

# myapp/api/resources.py
class EntryResource(ModelResource):
    user = fields.ForeignKey(UserResource, 'user')

    class Meta:
        queryset = Entry.objects.all()
        resource_name = 'entry'

    def dispatch(self, request_type, request, **kwargs):
        username = kwargs.pop('username')
        kwargs['user'] = get_object_or_404(User, username=username)
        return super(EntryResource, self).dispatch(request_type, request, **kwargs)

# urls.py
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from myapp.api import EntryResource

entry_resource = EntryResource()

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # The normal jazz here, then...
    (r'^api/(?P<username>\w+)/', include(entry_resource.urls)),
)