Customizable serialization now passing Django's test suite.

[Tom Christie]

I've been working away on django-serializers lately, and I've now got a

customizable serialization API that's backwards compatible with the existing

serializers, and is passing Django's serializer tests.

Exactly where I take this will depend on how Piotr Grabowski's GSoC project

progresses, but I'd certainly appreciate any input regarding the API design,

or if there would be any obvious blockers that'd prevent something along these

lines making it's way in as a replacement to the existing serializers.

This work intentionally doesn't (yet) address customizable deserialization,

and as such it currently only supports the existing loaddata deserialization.

Running the existing tests with django-serializers

==================================================

* Clone Django

* Install django-serializers

* Replace the existing dumpdata serializers with django-serializer's versions

In `django/core/serializers/__init__.py`, replace these strings:

"django.core.serializers.xml_serializer",

"django.core.serializers.python",

"django.core.serializers.json",

"django.core.serializers.pyyaml"

With these:

"serializers.dumpdata_xml",

"serializers.dumpdata_python",

"serializers.dumpdata_json",

"serializers.dumpdata_yaml"

* Run the serializer tests from Django's 'tests' directory

./runtests.py --settings=test_sqlite serializers serializers_regress

Example use-case

================

I've written a small app `django-auto-api` that uses `django-serializers`

to generate a read-only hyperlinked API for all installed models with `html`,

`json`, `yaml`, `xml` and `csv` outputs.

It demonstrates using custom relational fields between models to use

hyperlinking relationships rather than primary key relationships, and shows

how the customizable serialization can be used to build Web APIs with

very little code.

Summary

=======

As mentioned I'd appreciate any thoughts on what else it might take to bridge

the gap of getting this to the point where it could be adopted into core.

I think it should also serve as a decent point of reference for Piotr's GSoC project, in

particular `django-auto-api` is a good concrete use-case that I'd like any

customizable serialization proposal to be able to handle.

 - Tom

[1] django-serializers: https://github.com/tomchristie/django-serializers

[2] django-auto-api: https://github.com/tomchristie/django-auto-api