Nested Routers in Django Rest Framework

Nested routers in Django Rest Framework (DRF) allow you to define a hierarchical relationship between two or more resources in your API. This can be useful when you have resources that are related to each other, and you want to expose these relationships through your API endpoints.

To implement nested routers in DRF, you can use the DefaultRouter and NestedDefaultRouter classes. Here’s an example of how to use these classes to define a nested router:

from rest_framework import routers

router = routers.DefaultRouter()
# Registering the parent resource
router.register(r'parents', ParentViewSet)

# Creating a nested router for child resources
child_router = routers.NestedDefaultRouter(router, r'parents', lookup='parent')
# Registering the child resource
child_router.register(r'children', ChildViewSet, basename='parent-children')

In this example, we first create a DefaultRouter and register a ParentViewSet with the r'parents' URL pattern. Then, we create a NestedDefaultRouter that takes the parent router and the parent URL pattern as arguments. We also specify a lookup argument that is used to look up the parent resource when creating child resources. Finally, we register a ChildViewSet with the r'children' URL pattern on the child router.

This will create a URL pattern like parents/{parent_id}/children/, where {parent_id} is the ID of the parent resource. When a request is made to this URL, DRF will first look up the parent resource using the lookup argument, and then return the corresponding child resources.

Nested routers can be a powerful tool for organizing your API and making it more intuitive for your users to interact with. However, they can also add complexity to your code, so it’s important to carefully consider your API design and use nested routers only when they make sense.

A Simple Project on Nested Routers in Django

For this example, let’s assume that we have two resources: Book and Chapter. A Book can have many Chapters, and we want to define a nested relationship between these resources in our API.

Here are the steps to implement nested routers in Django:

1. Install Django and Django Rest Framework using pip:

pip install django djangorestframework

2. Create a new Django project:

django-admin startproject nested_routers_example

3. Create a new Django app called books:

cd nested_routers_example
python manage.py startapp books

4. Define the models for Book and Chapter in books/models.py:

from django.db import models

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)

class Chapter(models.Model):
    book = models.ForeignKey(Book, on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name='chapters')
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)

5. Create a serializers for Book and Chapter in books/serializers.py:

from rest_framework import serializers
from .models import Book, Chapter

class ChapterSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Chapter
        fields = ('id', 'title')

class BookSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    chapters = ChapterSerializer(many=True, read_only=True)
    class Meta:
        model = Book
        fields = ('id', 'title', 'chapters')

6. Define the viewsets for Book and Chapter in books/views.py:

from rest_framework import viewsets
from .models import Book, Chapter
from .serializers import BookSerializer, ChapterSerializer

class ChapterViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Chapter.objects.all()
    serializer_class = ChapterSerializer

class BookViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Book.objects.all()
    serializer_class = BookSerializer

7. Create a new urls.py file in the books app:

from rest_framework import routers
from django.urls import path, include
from .views import BookViewSet, ChapterViewSet

router = routers.DefaultRouter()
router.register(r'books', BookViewSet)

# Nested router for chapters
book_router = routers.NestedDefaultRouter(router, r'books', lookup='book')
book_router.register(r'chapters', ChapterViewSet)

urlpatterns = [
    path('', include(router.urls)),
    path('', include(book_router.urls)),
]

In this code, we first define a DefaultRouter and register the BookViewSet with the URL pattern r'books'. Then, we create a NestedDefaultRouter for the ChapterViewSet that takes the book_router and the book lookup argument. Finally, we register the ChapterViewSet with the URL pattern r'chapters'.

8. Add the books app to the INSTALLED_APPS list in nested_routers_example/settings.py.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',

    'rest_framework',

    'books', # add the books app here
]

9. Create the database tables:

python manage.py migrate

10 .Start the development server:

python manage.py runserver

Now you can test the API by sending HTTP requests to `http://localhost: