How to integrate django-reversion in django-rest-framework ModelViewSet

Ever used django-reversion?
It's an extension to the Django web framework that provides version control for model instances.
Pretty great for time-traveling inside your records, but what if you need to display versions using django-rest-framework API?

Here's a nice solution for this.

2021-07-29 update: I made a django-reversion-rest-framework package to help users to implement this. Check the documentation on pypy or in the GitHub repo.

Note: follow the official website for the installation and the integration of django-reversion in your project, otherwise future steps won't work.

Preparation

You might need to enable the ReversionMiddleware for storing a version for each API change. Follow the instructions here, you should add 'reversion.middleware.RevisionMiddleware' to your MIDDLEWARE setting.

Serializers

Create two custom serializers for Version and Revision

# serializers.py
from rest_framework import serializers
from reversion.models import Revision, Version


class RevisionSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    """
    you can use a custom user serializer here, if you omit this line the `user`
    field will contain the user_id
    """
    user = SimpleUserSerializer()

    class Meta:
        model = Revision
        fields = ('date_created', 'user', 'comment')


class VersionSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    revision = RevisionSerializer()

    class Meta:
        model = Version
        fields = ('revision', 'field_dict',)

Views

Extend the ModelViewSet with a history action

# views.py
from rest_framework import viewsets
from reversion.models import Version
from .serializers import VersionSerializer


class HistoryModelViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    @action(detail=True, methods=['GET'], name='Get History')
    def history(self, request, pk=None):
        object = self.get_object()
        versions = Version.objects.get_for_object(object)
        serializer = VersionSerializer(versions, many=True)
        return Response(serializer.data)

Then use your custom HistoryModelViewSet in place of the ModelViewSet.

class MyModelViewSet(HistoryModelViewSet):
    # ...

Hope this helps!