FastAPI Authorization Modifying the Tea Serializer

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, students will be able to update a serializer to reflect changes in data model relationships and display user associations in API responses.

Why update the serializer?

In this lesson, we will update the tea serializer so that it includes user information when returning tea data from our API.

Right now, our API does not include user details when retrieving tea data. We need to modify the serializer to:

This update will allow the API to return more complete data, making it easier for frontend applications to use.

Updating the tea schema

We need to modify the TeaSchema to include the user information.

# serializers/tea.py

from pydantic import BaseModel
from typing import Optional, List
from .comment import CommentSchema
from .user import UserResponseSchema  # Import the UserResponseSchema without the password

class TeaSchema(BaseModel):
    id: Optional[int] = True
    name: str
    in_stock: bool
    rating: int
    user: UserResponseSchema # New : returns user info with tea
    comments: List[CommentSchema] = []

    class Config:
        orm_mode = True

What does this update do?

• Includes the user data: Each tea object will now show details about the user who created it.
• Uses orm_mode = True: This allows SQLAlchemy models to be converted into Pydantic schemas correctly.
• Automatically populates user details: When retrieving tea data, the API response will now include the associated user’s information without sensitive data like the password.

Now that we’ve updated the serializer, we should test our changes to ensure the user association appears correctly in API responses.