You could use Haystack's SearchView (instead of a DRF view) which exposes the page object for pagination. Then you can just pass that to your serializer.
E.G. Awhile back I was working on something that required the json object of the rendered results on the current HTML page, so I wrote a filter tag to do this (we were using FacetedSearchView for the UI, and DRF for a more general purpose RESTful API). Called like so in the template:
var articlesJson = {{ page.object_list|article_jsonify }}
Actual filter tag:
import collections
from django.template import Library
from django.utils.safestring import mark_safe
from rest_framework.renderers import JSONRenderer
register = Library()
def article_jsonify(object):
if isinstance(object, collections.Iterable):
many = True
ids = [obj.object.id for obj in object]
else:
many = False
ids = [object.id]
articles = Article.objects.filter(pk__in=ids)
serializer = ArticleSerializer(articles, many=many)
content = JSONRenderer().render(serializer.data)
return mark_safe(content)
register.filter('article_jsonify', article_jsonify)
You could also write a view inherited from generics.ListAPIView and override the get_queryset method, where you would pass the request's query parameter to a SearchQuerySet, then output it using the Serializer. More info here:
http://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/filtering
Of course you might not be able to use the ModelSerializer this way, unless you do something like you mentioned. However DRF has an example on using the paginator on a queryset like so:
http://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/pagination#paginating-querysets
UPDATE
I ended up eventually using a DRF view that uses a Haystack SearchQuerySet as the queryset, and then passing it to a Paginator. Here is a simplified example (I'm sure it can be streamlined some), but I hope it helps someone gets started.
class ArticleList(ListCreateAPIView):
"""
List, Create files
"""
model = Article
def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
# simplified filtering of an SQS
q = request.get('q', '')
sqs = SearchQuerySet().filter(content=Clean(q))
paginator = Paginator(sqs, 20)
page = request.QUERY_PARAMS.get('page')
try:
articles = paginator.page(page)
except PageNotAnInteger:
# If page is not an integer, deliver first page
articles = paginator.page(1)
except PageNotAnInteger:
# If page is out of range, deliver last page
articles = paginator.page(paginator.num_pages)
serializer_context = {'request': request}
serializer = PaginatedArticleSerializer(articles, context=serializer_context)
return Response(serializer.data)
class ArticleSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
"""
Base Article Serializer
"""
class Meta:
model = Article
class PaginatedArticleSerializer(pagination.PaginationSerializer):
"""
Serializes page objects of article querysets.
"""
start_index = serializers.SerializerMethodField('get_start_index')
end_index = serializers.SerializerMethodField('get_end_index')
num_pages = serializers.Field(source='paginator.num_pages')
class Meta:
object_serializer_class = ArticleSerializer
def get_start_index(self, page):
return page.start_index()
def get_end_index(self, page):
return page.end_index()
def get_curr_page(self, page):
return page.number
