CountryField empty value json serialization vs 3.0

[Zoltan Szalai]

Hi,

First of all, huge thanks for 3.0! I've decided to migrate my latest
project to get a sense of it. One issue I ran into is with CountryField
from django-countries.
If the value is empty, 3.0 raises a "TypeError: Country(code=u'') is not
JSON serializable" exception. Checking out the 'to_representation'
method of ChoiceField makes it obvious why: Country(code=u'') is not in
('', None) and '' is not a key in the choices list and since 'Country' a
custom object it's not json serializable by default.

Putting something like:

if unicode(value) == '':
return ''

to the beginning of 'to_representation' would fix it but something
suggests it's not a great idea.

So what to do you think is the best way to solve this in 3.0 without
using custom serializer fields?

thanks
Zoltan

[Tom Christie]

The easiest way to deal with it would just be to create a custom field to deal with mapping it to a sensible output representation.

It would be interesting to know *why/how* this was able to work in 2.x tho'.

It's not impossible there's some subtle difference and that in 2.x it was using `serializers.ModelField` but is not using `serializers.ChoiceField` - not sure?...

[Vlad Lep]

Hi,

I had the same problem. I wrote a custom field  for the CountryField, as suggested, and overwrote the to_representation method. It works so thanks for the post.

I was curious if you found a different solution in the end? I use the country field in several models and would like to have it nicely done. 

Thanks,

Vlad

[Daviddd]

I have the same issue and I found this on github:

"Field is not serializeable with Django Rest Framework"

https://github.com/SmileyChris/django-countries/issues/106