Welcome to Django Serialize Model Graph’s documentation!

Django Serialize Model Graph lets you quickly serialize your django object and it’s relatives into some dictionary and store it, say, in MongoDB, and then later extract it and use just as if it wasn’t gone anywhere! Here are some example models:

class Entity(models.Model):
    key = models.CharField(max_length=50)


class RelatedEntity(models.Model):
    text = models.TextField()
    entity = models.ForeignKey(Entity, related_name='related_entities')

So, here’s how to use django_serialize_model_graph for encoding end decoding single entity:

entity = Entity()
encoded_entity = encode(entity)
decoded_entity = decode(encoded_entity)

And here’s how to encode and decode entity and it’s relatives:

# create some data
entity = Entity()
entity.save()
related_entity = RelatedEntity(entity=entity)
related_entity.save()
related_entity = RelatedEntity(entity=entity)
related_entity.save()

print len(RelatedEntity.objects.all()  # prints '2'
encoded_entity = encode_with_relatives(entity)
entity.delete()  # oops, deleted
print RelatedEntity.objects.count()  # prints '0'

# decode! magic happens!
decoded_entity = decode(encoded_entity)

print isinstance(decoded_entity, Entity)  # prints 'True'
print len(decoded_entity.related_entities.all())  #prints '2'

To convert encoded value into dict (to store in MongoDB, for example), you should do this:

encoded_entity = encode_with_relatives(entity)
encoded_dict = encoded_entity.to_dict()

To decode from dict you do:

entity = decode_from_dict(encoded_dict)

How it works

To encode and decode entities, django_serialize_model_graph uses django’s serialization mechanisms. To get “related objects”, it uses django’s django.db.models.deletion.Collector, which works when you do entity.delete(). It’s main strength is that it looks for objects that relate to original object via ForeignKey (with on_delete=CASCADE, which is the default) and also collects them (and their relatives). So, semantics of django_serialize_model_graph should match default django semantics for object deletion, which seems nice to me.

The entity.related_entities.all() works in a bit hardcore manner, by substituting Entity.__class__.related_entities descriptor for it’s own proxy. If you know better ways – please share them with me.

Indices and tables