Using Django Rest Framework, how can I upload a file AND send a JSON payload?

For someone who needs to upload a file and send some data, there is no straight fwd way you can get it to work. There is an open issue in json api specs for this. One possibility i have seen is to use multipart/related as shown here, but i think its very hard to implement it in drf.

Finally what i had implemented was to send the request as formdata. You would send each file as file and all other data as text.
Now for sending the data as text you can have a single key called data and send the whole json as string in value.

Models.py

class Posts(models.Model):
    id = models.UUIDField(default=uuid.uuid4, primary_key=True, editable=False)
    caption = models.TextField(max_length=1000)
    media = models.ImageField(blank=True, default="", upload_to="posts/")
    tags = models.ManyToManyField('Tags', related_name="posts")

serializers.py -> no special changes needed, not showing my serializer here as its too lengthy because of the writable ManyToMany Field implimentation.

views.py

class PostsViewset(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    serializer_class = PostsSerializer
    parser_classes = (MultipartJsonParser, parsers.JSONParser)
    queryset = Posts.objects.all()
    lookup_field = 'id'

You will need custom parser as shown below for parsing json.

utils.py

from django.http import QueryDict
import json
from rest_framework import parsers

class MultipartJsonParser(parsers.MultiPartParser):

    def parse(self, stream, media_type=None, parser_context=None):
        result = super().parse(
            stream,
            media_type=media_type,
            parser_context=parser_context
        )
        data = {}
        # find the data field and parse it
        data = json.loads(result.data["data"])
        qdict = QueryDict('', mutable=True)
        qdict.update(data)
        return parsers.DataAndFiles(qdict, result.files)

The request example in postman

EDIT:

see this extended answer if you want to send each data as key value pair