Serializing Foreign Key objects in Django

I had a similar requirement although not for RESTful purposes. I was able to achieve what I needed by using a "full" serializing module, in my case Django Full Serializers. This is part of wadofstuff and is distributed under the new BSD license.

Wadofstuff makes this quite easy. For e.g. in your case you'd need to do the following:

First, install wadofstuff.

Second, add the following setting to your settings.py file:

SERIALIZATION_MODULES = {
    'json': 'wadofstuff.django.serializers.json'
}

Third, make a slight change to the code used for serialization:

artifact = Artifact.objects.select_related().get(pk=pk)
serializers.serialize( "json", [ artifact ], indent = 4, 
    relations = ('object_type', 'individual',))

The key change is the relations keyword parameter. The only (minor) gotcha is to use the name of the fields forming the relation not the names of the related models.

Caveat

From the documentation:

The Wad of Stuff serializers are 100% compatible with the Django serializers when serializing a model. When deserializing a data stream the the Deserializer class currently only works with serialized data returned by the standard Django serializers.

(Emphasis added)

Hope this helps.

UPDATE: Actually Manoj's solution is a bit outdated, Wad of Stuff's serializer has been left un-updated for some time and when I tried that, it seems that it does not support Django 1.6 anymore.

However, take a look at Django's official doc here. It does provide some way around using the built-in natural key. It seems that django's built-in serializer has a a little problem supporting using ImageField as part of the natural key. But that can be easily fixed by your self.