Convert dictionaries to django model (recursively)

[Jacco77]

Hi,

I want build a custom api (have tried and abandoned tastypie and
restframework). I have come to the the point where I want to save a
dictionary in a django model.

Example:

class Person(models.Model):
name = models.CharField()
title = models.CharField()
class Log(models.Model):
person = models.ForeignKey(Person)
action = models.CharField()
time = models.DateTimeField()


I have a dictionary, and would like it to be saved to database

d = {
'person':{'name':'Joe', 'title':'Boss'},
'action':'Got to work',
'time':'2011-01-01 14:00'
}

if I do:
Log(**d)

I get error message:
Cannot assign "'person':{'name':'Joe', 'title':'Boss'}": "Log.person"
must be a "Person" instance.

How can I get django to understand that I want it to convert my
dictionary recursively? Then I want to full save it (the whole blob)
recursively, that is fields that are pointing to other models should
be saved first.


Thanks in advance

David

[Landy Chapman]

This forum may help you with the dictionary-within-dictionary...
>> http://www.daniweb.com/software-development/python/threads/248240

for help with your models, check out (at least)
>> https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/intro/tutorial01/
>> https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/intro/tutorial02/

>> https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/models/relations/

[Masklinn]

On 2011-08-15, at 18:11 , Jacco77 wrote:
>
> How can I get django to understand that I want it to convert my
> dictionary recursively? Then I want to full save it (the whole blob)
> recursively, that is fields that are pointing to other models should
> be saved first.

The only piece of Django I can think of which would do that sort of
things is the serialization framework.

While it does not (as far as I know) expose any interface to
serializing objects as Python dicts and arrays, it does support
serializing to JSON (although the structure is a bit more complex
than what you show here as it stores the instance's model at a
higher level of the structure than the raw field values), it should
be a good start towards vivifying simple dicts into complete object
structures.

Therefore, I would recommend looking into serializers and how they're
coded, and maybe just rework your dict structure a bit and add a new
serializer to/from python dicts (I'm not sure how pluggable django's
serializers are, but considering there's a SERIALIZATION_MODULES[0]
settings key I'm guessing you can add pretty much anything you want,
and some googling leads me to think it's even possible to replace
the built-in serializers[1]).

See also: http://readthedocs.org/docs/django-testing-docs/en/latest/serialization.html

[0] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#serialization-modules
[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/wadofstuff-django-serializers