Django Rest Framework - Create foreign key object on POST

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I have a simple DRF REST API that I want to use to create blog articles. I want to be able to add tags to those blog articles so users can search tags and see related articles. However, the tags may not exist yet. I have created an Article Model with a ForeignKey field to a Tag Model like this:

class Tag(models.Model):

    name = models.CharField(max_length=32)

    def _str__(self):
        return self.name

    class Meta:
        ordering = ('name',)

class Article(models.Model):

    title = models.CharField(max_length=256)
    author = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    content = models.TextField()
    date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    tags = models.ForeignKey(Tag, on_delete=models.CASCADE, blank=True, default=None)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

    class Meta:
        ordering = ('date', 'id')

Ideally what I want is to be able to POST a new Article with a set of tags, and if any of the tags don't exist, create them in the DB. However, as it is currently, the tags need to already exist to be added to the Article. Visually, DRF shows this as a dropdown that is populated with pre-existing tags:

DRF Interface

How can I add or create multiple Tags from my Article API endpoint?

EDIT: As requested, I've added my views.py

views.py:

from api.blog.serializers import ArticleSerializer, TagSerializer
from rest_framework import viewsets

# /api/blog/articles
class ArticleView(viewsets.ModelViewSet):

    queryset = Article.objects.all()
    serializer_class = ArticleSerializer

# /api/blog/tags
class TagView(viewsets.ModelViewSet):

    queryset = Tag.objects.all()
    serializer_class = TagSerializer

For completeness, here are my serializers from my REST API's serializers.py.

serializers.py:

class ArticleSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    class Meta:
        model = Article
        fields = '__all__'


class TagSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    class Meta:
        model = Tag
        fields = '__all__'

urls.py:

from rest_framework import routers

router = routers.DefaultRouter()
router.register('articles', views.ArticleView)
router.register('tags', views.TagView)

urlpatterns = [
    path('', include(router.urls)),
]
django-rest-framework foreign-keys django python
2 Answers

Overriding the create() method of the serializer as

class ArticleSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    tags = serializers.CharField()

    class Meta:
        model = Article
        fields = '__all__'

    def create(self, validated_data):
        tag = validated_data.pop('tags')
        tag_instance, created = Tag.objects.get_or_create(name=tag)
        article_instance = Article.objects.create(**validated_data, tags=tag_instance)
        return article_instance
user_82838480

Okay, thanks to @JPG for their help. This is what I've ended up with. It allows users to add space delimited tags into a CharField on the /api/blog/article endpoint. When a POST request is performed, the tags are split on spaces, get_or_create()d (for this to work I needed to make Tag.name the primary key), and then added to the Article with article.tags.set(tag_list). As @JPG and @Martins suggested, a ManyToManyField() was the best way to do this.

Here is my full code:

serializers.py:

class ArticleSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    class TagsField(serializers.CharField):

        def to_representation(self, tags):
            tags = tags.all()
            return "".join([(tag.name + " ") for tag in tags]).rstrip(' ')


    tags = TagsField()

    class Meta:
        model = Article
        fields = '__all__'

    def create(self, validated_data):

        tags = validated_data.pop('tags') # Removes the 'tags' entry
        tag_list = []
        for tag in tags.split(' '):
            tag_instance, created = Tag.objects.get_or_create(name=tag)
            tag_list += [tag_instance]

        article = Article.objects.create(**validated_data)
        print(tag_list)
        article.tags.set(tag_list)
        article.save()
        return article


class TagSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    class Meta:
        model = Tag
        fields = '__all__'

Note that I had to create a custom TagField() and override to_representation(). This is because if I used a regular serializer.CharField() tags were displayed as: "Blog.tag.None" instead of the tag values, like this:

Blog.tag.None

models.py:

class Tag(models.Model):

    name = models.CharField(max_length=32, primary_key=True)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.name

    class Meta:
        ordering = ('name',)

class Article(models.Model):

    title = models.CharField(max_length=256)
    author = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    content = models.TextField()
    date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    tags = models.ManyToManyField(Tag)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

    class Meta:
        ordering = ('date', 'id')
user_19971950
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