[FIXED] Django model rendering number instead of string

Issue

I'm creating a blog site with authors posting blogs, etc. The issue is with rendering the author's name, instead django is returning a number.

My blog model:

class Blog(models.Model):
    title=models.CharField(max_length=255)
    author=models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    date_posted=models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    body=models.TextField()

    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

And my serializer:

    class Meta:
        model=Blog
        fields=('title', 'author', 'body', 'date_posted')

However, in django rest framework it's rendering a number, when it should be the 'admin' user:

[
{
        "title": "First Blog",
        "author": 1,
        "body": "Example blog text",
        "date_posted": "2022-05-18T23:55:21.529755Z"
    }
]

A bit confused, since there's no error, it just isn't rendering 'admin'. Any help would help thanks.

Solution

It is showing the primary key of the User object, which is what is stored in a foreign key field.

To follow that through to the User objects username (and assuming you don't have a User serializer), you could create a custom field, eg,

class Meta:
    model=Blog
    fields=('title', 'author', 'author_name', 'body', 'date_posted')

author_name = serializers.SerializerMethodField('get_author_name')

def get_author_name(self, obj):
    return obj.author.username

Answered By - SamSparx