How to Update User Profile and User in one request in Django?

Note: If you are looking for a Full Stack Developer (Django+React), then connect with me on LinkedIn or contact me through my portfolio.

Let’s say you have a Django User model and a UserProfile model connected via OneToOneField . Your goal is to serialize both the models together in a single request to perform needed CRUD operations.

Note: I am not assuming whether you have a custom User model or provided by Django, this blog’s code will work with both custom and Django’s User model.

Let’s say your UserProfile model looks something like this:

class UserProfile(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User, related_name='userprofile', on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    # custom fields for userprofile
    mobile = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    #...

Let’s create a serializer for our UserProfile & User model in our [serializers.py](http://serializers.py) file (inside our Django app):

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
from rest_framework import serializers
from accounts.models import UserProfile

User = get_user_model()

class UserProfileSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = UserProfile
        fields = ('mobile',)

class UserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    profile = UserProfileSerializer(source="userprofile", many=False)

    class Meta:
        model = User
        fields = ('username', 'email', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'profile')

        # Custom .update() method for serializer to handle UserProfile data update
        def update(self, instance, validated_data):
            userprofile_serializer = self.fields['profile']
            userprofile_instance = instance.userprofile
            userprofile_data = validated_data.pop('userprofile', {})

            # to access the UserProfile fields in here
            # mobile = userprofile_data.get('mobile')

            # update the userprofile fields
            userprofile_serializer.update(userprofile_instance, userprofile_data)

            instance = super().update(instance, validated_data)
            return instance

This is it, now we can create our APIView to perform CRUD operations:

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
from rest_framework.generics import RetrieveUpdateAPIView
from rest_framework.permissions import IsAuthenticated
from accounts.serializers import UserSerializer

User = get_user_model()

class UserAPIView(RetrieveUpdateAPIView):
    serializer_class = UserSerializer
    queryset = User.objects.all()
    permission_classes = (IsAuthenticated,)

    def get_object(self):
        return self.request.user