unable to access object's property despite it being present

My serializer:

class TaskSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Task
        fields = "__all__"

    def create(self, validated_data):
        try:
            print(validated_data)
            print(validated_data.author)
            task = Task.objects.create(**validated_data)
            return task
        except BaseException as e:
            print(e)
            raise HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST

my view:

class TaskCreateApiView(generics.CreateAPIView):
    serializer_class = TaskSerializer

my model:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class Task(models.Model):
    content = models.CharField(
        default="",
        max_length=255,
    )
    author = models.ForeignKey(
        User,
        on_delete=models.CASCADE,
        null=True,
    )
    category = models.CharField(
        default="",
        max_length=255,
    )

    def __str__(self):
        return str(self.id) + self.content

My log from serializer:

{‘content’: ‘test2’, ‘category’: ‘test’, ‘author’: <User: zaq1>}

‘dict’ object has no attribute ‘author’
print(validated_data.author)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: ‘dict’ object has no attribute ‘author’

How can I access author? I see it exists as <User:zaq1> but can’t seem to access it

>Solution :

The error is because you print validate_data.author, whereas it should be validate_data['author']:

class TaskSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Task
        fields = '__all__'

    def create(self, validated_data):
        try:
            print(validated_data)
            print(validated_data['author'])
            task = Task.objects.create(**validated_data)
            return task
        except BaseException as e:
            print(e)
            raise HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST

That being said, normally manually creating in a serializer is a (serious) antipattern: a lot of work in the serializer goes to creating objects with many-to-many fields, or deeply nested data.