django restframework: How to add an array name

Question

Lets say I have a simple django model:

class Snippet(models.Model):
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=True, default='')

When I display info from it as JSON through the django web framework I get this:

[{"id": 1, "title": "hello"}, {"id": 2, "title": "world"}]

How would I add an array title to the generated JSON? Like so:

["books" :{"id": 1, "title": "hello"}, {"id": 2, "title": "world"}]

You must write a custom serializer. Pagination does something like this, look at the sources of rest_framework.pagination.PaginationSerializer for inspiration. — Paulo Scardine
– Paulo Scardine, Commented Jun 26, 2014 at 14:40
This is a little against DRY because you probably already have the information about the model on the URL. Your URL is probably something like /api/books, so clients can derive the type of object from that. Probably this is why the framework has no provision for it. — Paulo Scardine
– Paulo Scardine, Commented Jun 26, 2014 at 14:45
Yes, but I want to use it for when I'm parsing the data from the API on Android. — RuSs
– RuSs, Commented Jun 26, 2014 at 15:14

Paulo Scardine · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-27 03:00:06Z

So your client API requires the JSON to be an object instead of an array (there was a security rationale for it when using the browser built-in javascript parser to parse JSON but I forgot the reason)...

If your client API does not mind the extra fields added by PaginationSerializer, you can do:

class BookSerializer(pagination.BasePaginationSerializer):
    results_field = "books"

class BookListView(generics.ListAPIView):
    model = Book
    pagination_serializer_class = BookSerializer
    paginate_by = 9999

This will result:

{
   'count': 2, 
   'next': null, 
   'previous': null, 
   'books': [
       {"id": 1, "title": "hello"}, 
       {"id": 2, "title": "world"}
   ]
}

[update]

The security reason for avoiding an array as the JSON root is JSON Hijacking. Basically, a clever hacker could override the array constructor in order to do nasty things. Only relevant if your API are answering GET requests and using cookies for authentication.

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