Django rest framework nested self-referential objects

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Instead of using ManyRelatedField, use a nested serializer as your field:

class SubCategorySerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Category
        fields = ('name', 'description')

class CategorySerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    parentCategory = serializers.PrimaryKeyRelatedField()
    subcategories = serializers.SubCategorySerializer()

    class Meta:
        model = Category
        fields = ('parentCategory', 'name', 'description', 'subcategories')

If you want to deal with arbitrarily nested fields you should take a look at the customising the default fields part of the docs. You can’t currently directly declare a serializer as a field on itself, but you can use these methods to override what fields are used by default.

class CategorySerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    parentCategory = serializers.PrimaryKeyRelatedField()

    class Meta:
        model = Category
        fields = ('parentCategory', 'name', 'description', 'subcategories')

        def get_related_field(self, model_field):
            # Handles initializing the `subcategories` field
            return CategorySerializer()

Actually, as you’ve noted the above isn’t quite right.
This is a bit of a hack, but you might try adding the field in after the serializer is already declared.

class CategorySerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    parentCategory = serializers.PrimaryKeyRelatedField()

    class Meta:
        model = Category
        fields = ('parentCategory', 'name', 'description', 'subcategories')

CategorySerializer.base_fields['subcategories'] = CategorySerializer()

A mechanism of declaring recursive relationships is something that needs to be added.

Edit: Note that there is now a third-party package available that specifically deals with this kind of use-case. See djangorestframework-recursive.

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