Given the following model that stores the user's wish list for reading books:

class ReadingList(models.Model):
    user_id = models.ForeignKey(UserInfo, on_delete=models.DO_NOTHING, null=False, blank=False, default=None, db_column='user_id')
    book= models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=False)
    creation_time = models.DateTimeField(blank=True)

    class Meta:
        unique_together = (('user_id', book),)

I want to create a model that helps in tracking the time spent in the reading the book on different days which looks something like this:

class ReadingTracker(models.Model):
    user_id = models.ForeignKey(ReadingList, on_delete=models.DO_NOTHING, related_name='user', blank=False, db_column='user_id')
    book= models.ForeignKey(ReadingList, on_delete=models.DO_NOTHING, related_name='book-to-read', blank=False, db_column='book')
    time = models.DateTimeField(blank=True)
    time_spent = models.floatfield()

On the client-side (corresponding to ReadingTracker) for both the fields user_id and book I see that ReadingList object (1), ReadingList object (2), ... are listed. But, this is not working as expected. What I want to achieve are the following:

1. For user_id field I want to see the something like dummy_uid1, dummy_uid2, ... to be listed.

2. Consider dummy_uid1 wants to read book1 and book2 whereas dummy_uid2 wants to read book1 and book3. When dummy_uid1 is selected as user_id, I want only book1 and book2 to be listed for selection.

How do I define the model in django rest framework to achieve this? Any suggestions related to the above would be much appreciated and thank you in advance.

CodePudding user response：

There are two parts to this question:

1. If you want to see a different value than ReadingList object (1) then you need to define the __str__ value of your model, you can do this like so:

   class ReadingList(models.Model):
      ...
   
      def __str__(self):
         return f'{self.user_id}' # return whatever string you want to display
   

2. If you want to just display the books for a particular user then you can use a filter() (see the Django documentation):

   reading_list = ReadingList.objects.get(...)
   ReadingTracker.objects.filter(user_id=reading_list)
   

However, I would add that you have a user_id on your ReadingList object which does seem to connect to a User model, but your user_id on ReadingTracker is a ForeignKey relation to ReadingList, which is confusing. I would suggest renaming the field or actually making it link to the User model (though this is unnecessary as you can still filter by User through the ReadingList model).