Django queryset list that have expanded relational model data - json

Question

In my Django webapp, I have Function Based API that display a list for with pagination. The problem is I want each row in the list to have expanded output of relational field.
This is my model for attendance:
class Attendance(models.Model):
CHECKIN = 1
CHECKOUT = 2
ATTENDANCE_TYPE_CHOICES = (
(CHECKIN, "Check In"),
(CHECKOUT, "Check Out"),
)
employee = models.ForeignKey(Employee)
company = models.ForeignKey(Company)
activity_type = models.IntegerField(choices = ATTENDANCE_TYPE_CHOICES, default=CHECKIN)
This is part of my list API where I define what fields I want to display and is paginated.
employee_list = Employee.objects.filter(company = auth_employee.employee.company.id).values("id","employee","company","activity_type").order_by('id')
page = request.GET.get('page', request.POST['page'])
paginator = Paginator(employee_list, request.POST['page_limit'])
try:
employees = paginator.page(page)
except PageNotAnInteger:
employees = paginator.page(request.POST['page'])
except EmptyPage:
employees = paginator.page(paginator.num_pages)
return Response(list(employees), status=status.HTTP_200_OK)
The output is a list like this but without employee detail.
[
{
"id": 14,
"employee": 15,
"company": 15,
"activity_type": 1,
},
{
"id": 15,
"employee": 15,
"company": 15,
"activity_type": 2,
}
]
My expected output, how do I get something like this ?
[
{
"id": 14,
"employee": {
"id":"2",
"name":"Michael"
},
"company": 15,
"activity_type": 1,
},
{
"id": 15,
"employee": {
"id":"2",
"name":"Jeniffer"
},
"company": 15,
"activity_type": 2,
}
]
How can I produce a list that shows the relational data like above to display in the json response ?

Answer 1

What you're describing is serialization, in this case nested serialization in which django model relationship references get serialized in the structure you described above.
There's no out of the box way to do this with django. The django-rest-framework project has solved this issue with their nested serializers
If you're working on an API that will be outputting the results to JSON to be consumed by some service or client other than Django's templates, I would seriously consider adding that to your project.