FloatField vs DecimalField in Django and JS/React

Question

I have a Django app as the backend a React app as the frontend. Most of my Django fields related to prices/monetary values were FloatField. It worked with the frontend: when receiving objects from the backend I could see that those fields were numbers and I could make calculations with them. But I've recently changed from FloatField to DecimalField, and now on the frontend the prices are assumed as string. Why is that happening and what is the best approach to deal with this? Has anyone experienced something similar?

Answer 1

DecimalField also takes an optional argument, coerce_to_string. If set to True the representation will be output as a string. If set to False the representation will be left as a Decimal instance and the final representation will be determined by the renderer.

If unset, this will default to the same value as the COERCE_DECIMAL_TO_STRING setting, which is True unless set otherwise.

As you can see the default value of COERCE_DECIMAL_TO_STRING is True, if you want to change it you can do this:

# settings.py
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'COERCE_DECIMAL_TO_STRING': False,
    ... 
}