Make Django Rest Framework Datetime Fields Timezone Aware
How to Make Django Rest Framework’s DateTimeField Timezone Aware when outputting#
The truth is that django and drf do really well with timezones.
As shown in the docs, when USE_TZ=True django will store datetimes in UTC.
Then when they are retrieved to the template they will be output in the timezone set with the TIME_ZONE setting.
But Django Rest Framework serialisers don’t output date and times in the set timezone
So to get around this we need to extend the default DateTimeField serializer.
class DateTimeFieldWihTZ(serializers.DateTimeField):
'''Class to make output of a DateTime Field timezone aware
'''
def to_representation(self, value):
value = timezone.localtime(value)
return super(DateTimeFieldWihTZ, self).to_representation(value)
class QueueSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = Queue
fields = ('id', 'branch', 'date', 'length', 'wait_time',)
date = DateTimeFieldWihTZ(format='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M')
So as shown above we override the to_representation method of the default DateTimeField.
Now the json output of the viewset will be in the expected timezone.
Writing tests for these scenarios is very important