How to serialize SqlAlchemy result to JSON?

Question

Django has some good automatic serialization of ORM models returned from DB to JSON format.

How to serialize SQLAlchemy query result to JSON format?

I tried

Answer 1

Flask-JsonTools package has an implementation of JsonSerializableBase Base class for your models.

Usage:

from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base
from flask.ext.jsontools import JsonSerializableBase

Base = declarative_base(cls=(JsonSerializableBase,))

class User(Base):
    #...

Now the User model is magically serializable.

If your framework is not Flask, you can just grab the code

Answer 2

You could just output your object as a dictionary:

class User:
   def as_dict(self):
       return {c.name: getattr(self, c.name) for c in self.__table__.columns}

And then you use User.as_dict() to serialize your object.

As explained in Convert sqlalchemy row object to python dict

Answer 3

following code will serialize sqlalchemy result to json.

import json
from collections import OrderedDict


def asdict(self):
    result = OrderedDict()
    for key in self.__mapper__.c.keys():
        if getattr(self, key) is not None:
            result[key] = str(getattr(self, key))
        else:
            result[key] = getattr(self, key)
    return result


def to_array(all_vendors):
    v = [ ven.asdict() for ven in all_vendors ]
    return json.dumps(v) 

Calling fun,

def all_products():
    all_products = Products.query.all()
    return to_array(all_products)

Answer 4

The AlchemyEncoder is wonderful but sometimes fails with Decimal values. Here is an improved encoder that solves the decimal problem -

class AlchemyEncoder(json.JSONEncoder):
# To serialize SQLalchemy objects 
def default(self, obj):
    if isinstance(obj.__class__, DeclarativeMeta):
        model_fields = {}
        for field in [x for x in dir(obj) if not x.startswith('_') and x != 'metadata']:
            data = obj.__getattribute__(field)
            print data
            try:
                json.dumps(data)  # this will fail on non-encodable values, like other classes
                model_fields[field] = data
            except TypeError:
                model_fields[field] = None
        return model_fields
    if isinstance(obj, Decimal):
        return float(obj)
    return json.JSONEncoder.default(self, obj)

Answer 5

Python 3.7+ and Flask 1.1+ can use the built-in dataclasses package

from dataclasses import dataclass
from datetime import datetime
from flask import Flask, jsonify
from flask_sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy


app = Flask(__name__)
db = SQLAlchemy(app)


@dataclass
class User(db.Model):
  id: int
  email: str

  id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True, auto_increment=True)
  email = db.Column(db.String(200), unique=True)


@app.route('/users/')
def users():
  users = User.query.all()
  return jsonify(users)  


if __name__ == "__main__":
  users = User(email="user1@gmail.com"), User(email="user2@gmail.com")
  db.create_all()
  db.session.add_all(users)
  db.session.commit()
  app.run()

The /users/ route will now return a list of users.

[
  {"email": "user1@gmail.com", "id": 1},
  {"email": "user2@gmail.com", "id": 2}
]

Auto-serialize related models

@dataclass
class Account(db.Model):
  id: int
  users: User

  id = db.Column(db.Integer)
  users = db.relationship(User)  # User model would need a db.ForeignKey field

The response from jsonify(account) would be this.

{  
   "id":1,
   "users":[  
      {  
         "email":"user1@gmail.com",
         "id":1
      },
      {  
         "email":"user2@gmail.com",
         "id":2
      }
   ]
}

Overwrite the default JSON Encoder

from flask.json import JSONEncoder


class CustomJSONEncoder(JSONEncoder):
  "Add support for serializing timedeltas"

  def default(o):
    if type(o) == datetime.timedelta:
      return str(o)
    elif type(o) == datetime.datetime:
      return o.isoformat()
    else:
      return super().default(o)

app.json_encoder = CustomJSONEncoder      

Answer 6

Under Flask, this works and handles datatime fields, transforming a field of type
'time': datetime.datetime(2018, 3, 22, 15, 40) into
"time": "2018-03-22 15:40:00":

obj = {c.name: str(getattr(self, c.name)) for c in self.__table__.columns}

# This to get the JSON body
return json.dumps(obj)

# Or this to get a response object
return jsonify(obj)