When do we need pass queryset argument to PrimaryKeyRelatedField in Django REST Framework? - serialization

I was reading DRF docs and in primaryKeyRelatedField i saw the arguments as
queryset - The queryset used for model instance lookups when validating the field input. Relationships must either set a queryset explicitly, or set read_only=True.
I understand that PrimarykeyRelatedField is used to serialize relationships using primary keys. However, i am not able to understand why do we need to pass queryset as an argument to PrimaryKeyRelatedField. I coundn't find any examples in docs, i saw some examples online but still not able to figure out. Please help me to understand this with any use case or example. Thank you in advance.

A bit older question but for some still searching - you can use it in process of deserialization
entity = serializers.PrimaryKeyRelatedField(queryset=Entity.objects.all())
Thanks to this you are able to specify only primary key in create/update request body:
{
"entity": 1
}
this will automatically look for the entity, providing 400 response code if not found in given queryset you provided. If it is found, you are provided instance of the Entity in validated_data of used serializer.
serializer.validated_data["entity"] # this will return Entity object

Related

Using the DoctrineObjectConstructor, how are new entities created?

I am attempting to use JMSSerializerBundle to consume JSON into Doctrine entities. I need to both create new entities where they do not already exist in the database, and update existing entities when they do already exist. I am using the DoctrineObjectConstructor included in the JMSSerializer package to help with this. When I consume JSON which contains a property designated as an identifier, such as:
{
"id": 1,
"some_other_attribute": "stuff"
}
by attempting to deserialize it, JMSSerializer causes warnings and eventually dies with an exception for attempting to utilize reflection to set properties on a null value. The warnings all look like this:
PHP Warning: ReflectionProperty::setValue() expects parameter 1 to be object, null given in /Users/cdonadeo/Repos/Ubertester/vendor/jms/serializer/src/JMS/Serializer/GenericDeserializationVisitor.php on line 176
If I manually insert an entity with ID 1 in my database and make another attempt then I receive no errors and everything appears to be working correctly, but I'm now short half my functionality. I looked at the code for the DoctrineObjectConstructor class, and at the top is a comment:
/**
* Doctrine object constructor for new (or existing) objects during deserialization.
*/
But I don't see how it could possibly create a new a new entity because after the construct() function has done all of its checks, at the end it calls:
$object = $objectManager->find($metadata->name, $identifierList);
And since the identifier does not exist in the database the result is null which is ultimately what gets returned from the function. This explains why inserting a row in the database with the appropriate ID makes things work: find() now returns a proper Entity object, which is what the rest of the library expects.
Am I using the library wrong or is it broken? I forked the Git repo and made an edit, and trying it out everything seems to work more or less the way I expected. That edit does have some drawbacks that make me wonder if I'm not just making this more difficult than it has to be. The biggest issue I see is that it will cause persisted and unpersisted entities to be mixed together with no way to tell which ones are which, but I don't know if that's even a big deal.
For Doctrine entities use configuration:
jms_serializer:
object_constructors:
doctrine:
fallback_strategy: "fallback" # possible values ("null" | "exception" | "fallback")
see configuration reference https://jmsyst.com/bundles/JMSSerializerBundle/master/configuration

Yii CActiveRecord with Column Named "attributes"

I used the CRUD generator from a legacy database. When searching for a column value I get the following error:
htmlspecialchars() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given (/usr/local/share/yii/framework/web/helpers/CHtml.php:103)
The problem is that the model has an existing column named "attributes" which is creating a conflict. I removed the entry from the _search.php and commented out all instances in the model hoping to at least get it working but no luck. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Every CActiveRecord instance (or CModel instance for that matter) has a getter/setter named attributes with which all the attributes can be set. This leads to a conflict because the generated crud code uses the attributes attribute expecting it works as described before.
The controller does something like:
$model->attributes=$_POST['ModelClassName'];
// or
$model->attributes=$_GET['ModelClassName'];
This is meant to set al the (safe) attributes of the model at once. Instead this overwrites the database attribute attributes of your legacy DB model.
This in turn leads to the error you describe, because $_GET['ModelClassName'] and $_POST['ModelClassName'] typically contain arrays of data.
I guess the easiest fix would be to directly call the setter function for the "normal" attributes behavior which would lead to replacing the lines mentioned above with something like the following:
// in the controller
$model->setAttributes($_POST['ModelClassName']);
// and
$model->setAttributes($_GET['ModelClassName']);
I think rest of the generated CRUD code (the views) could and should be left untouched to make it work.
If you want to know how and why this works, it's best to do some research into the __get and __set magic functions and how they're used in the yii framework.

Automatically update Entity instance from class MVC 3

I've got a class that closely resembles one of my entities (I use the class for JSON de/serialization because the entity fails conversion to JSON, one of the known gotchyas of JSON + MVC).
Once I deserilize a JSON string into my object, is there a way to automatically update the associated Entity model instance. The property names are the same.
e.g.
'myDeserialized is the deserialized JSON object coming over the wire
Dim entityInstance As DLL.Person = db.getPersonById(myDeserialized.id)
myDeserialized.update(entityInstance)
Where this just goes through and takes all the properties in myDeserialized and updates the same named property in entityInstance?
Or is it possible to just iterate over a key-value pair of all the properties in an object/entity?
I'm looking for something like TryUpdateModel(), but that only works with forms, right? I don't want to tie my data to a form, that's all.
Thanks!
I don't know what type and version of EF you use, but there are very powerful functions for iterating on the entities properties. Which mean you can easily make your update function on the entity or its baseclass' partial (entityInstance.Update(myDesrialized)).
If you use EntityObject, then you can get an ObjectStateEntry for your entities and via this class you can very easily achieve this.
Please let us know what version and type of EF you use (POCO?)

VB.NET problem converting DataTable to JSON

Ok so I'm trying to use the JavaScriptSerializer to work with this code. However it crashes when it reaches the last line;
Dim json As New String(sr.Serialize(dt))
I get this error message;
A circular reference was detected
while serializing an object of type
'System.Reflection.Module'.
I would really appreciate any insights that could help solve this problem.
Circular reference means that serialising the object would result in an infinite loop.
For example if you would try to serialize object "A" having a 1 to 1 reference to object "B".
Declare a class containg the data you want to serialize with JSON to solve this issue.
As hkda150 has already said, you could use a class specifically tailored for being serialized.
This will furthermore enable you to have foreign key values serialized instead of having related full objects serialized. Thus, if you are serializing object a which has a property a.SomeB of type B, then you will often want the ID of a.someB to be present in your webpage. Obviously I don't know enough to be able to say if this is relevant in your specific use case.
BTW, If you find yourself doing a lot of mapping between "business objects" and "objects meant for serialization" you may want to consider using AutoMapper.

C# 2.0 - Is there any way to do a `GroupBy` with a yielded iterator block?

I'm working with a C# 2.0 app so linq/lambda answers will be no help here.
Basically I'm faced with a situation where i need to yield return an object but only if one if it's properties is unique (Group By). For example,..say i have a collection of users and i want a grouped collection based on name (i might have 20 Daves but I'd only want to see one in my collection).
Now i can think of a bunch of situations where this might be useful but I don't think it's possible in C# 2.0 without my explicitly keeping track of what I'm yielding with another internal list. To do it without I'd need to have access to the previously yielded set to check if they exist.
Am I over-thinking this or does it make sense? Maybe having access to the yield through the IEnumerable<T> interface would make sense so you'd be able to do something like this-
IEnumerable<User> UsersByNameGroup(User userToGroupBy)
{
foreach(User u in Users)
{
if(!yield.Find(delegate(User u){return u.Name == userToGroupBy.Name;})) yield return u;
}
}
No, you'll have to keep track of the generated elements internally. But note that a hash-based lookup datastructure (Dictionary etc.) is sufficient for the purpose of detecting duplicates.
(As a side note: In .NET 3.5, there are builtin GroupBy-Methods)