Django Return String Field Instead of ID on Foreign Key

Question

I have a game object that includes data from the 'Word' model. Everything works great, besides not being able to get the string of the user instead of the ID. A lot of searches have mentioned that the __str__(self): return (self.player.name) should work, but I still get an ID in as 'player'

example of data:

[ { "game": 1, "turn": 1, "player": 1, "word": "test", "score": 18 }, { "game": 1, "turn": 2, "player": 2, "word": "test", "score": 12 } ]

would like to see:

[ { "game": 1, "turn": 1, "player": 'Bob', "word": "trend", "score": 18 }, { "game": 1, "turn": 2, "player": 'Sarah', "word": "test", "score": 12 } ]

models.py

class User(models.Model):

    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    email = models.EmailField()

class Word(models.Model):
    game = models.ForeignKey(Game, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    turn = models.IntegerField()
    player = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    word = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    score = models.IntegerField()

    def __str__(self):
        return str(self.player.name)

serializers.py

class WordSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        
        model = Word
        fields = ['game', 'turn', 'player', 'word', 'score']

class GameSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    data = serializers.SerializerMethodField(read_only=True)

    class Meta:
        
        model = Game
        fields = ['id', 'date' ,'data']

        def get_data(self, obj):
            return WordSerializer(obj.word, many=True).data

Answer 1

The table Word save the player id, if you want to customize the response you can do it on the serializer level

class WordSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    player_name = serializers.CharField(source='player.name')

    class Meta:
        
        model = Word
        fields = ['game', 'turn', 'player', 'player_name',  'word', 'score']