Pass extra meta into each field for the OPTIONS call

[oesah]

Currently, when we make an OPTIONS call to the API, we get the actions attribute back that contains POST and/or PUT. In actions.POST for instance, we get all the fields, with some meta data. We can use this meta data to build forms in one page applications built with React, Angular or other frameworks.

By allowing to pass additional meta to each, we are able to render a Form in our application just from the OPTIONS calls, which eliminates a lot of work rebuilding all of the logic in the frontend.

I did this with a prototype application I working on right now, and it works like a charm. The only annoying thing is, that I needed to completely overwrite SimpleMetadata to achieve this.

This is how I did it:

from rest_framework import serializers

from .models import MyModel

class MySerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel
        fields = '__all__'
        meta_extra = {
            'start_date_month': {
                'mui': {
                    'xs': 6,
                }
            },
            'start_date_year': {
                'mui': {
                    'xs': 6,
                },
            },
            'end_date_month': {
                'mui': {
                    'xs': 6,
                },
                'show_when': {
                    'currently_works_here': False,
                }
            },
            'end_date_year': {
                'mui': {
                    'xs': 6,
                },
                'show_when': {
                    'currently_works_here': False,
                }
            }
        }

And in my class APIRootMetadata(SimpleMetadata) in get_serializer_info() I added this:

        if hasattr(serializer.Meta, 'meta_extra'):
            field_info['meta_extra'] = serializer.Meta.meta_extra.get(
                field.field_name,
                {},
            )

Now, in my React application, I just need to get the response from my OPTIONS call and I can build the form completely dynamically. I can even style the material UI form by adjusting the meta_extra.

Anyway, is this something we could support out of the box? It would be helpful just to be able to add additional meta data to each field with the same logic as we do with extra_kwargs.