Flask: Converting Python dict to json object for client api
Generally is a bad idea your approach on jsonifying a model:
self.__dict__may contain a lot of undocumented keys- column types: you can't jsonify
relationshipand column types directly. And notably adatetimecolumn. - security: sometimes you might want to hide some fields (for untrusted users consuming your APIs for example)
A good approach is to create a method to return a json serializable dictionary:
class Foo(db.Model): field1 = db.Column(...) field2 = db.Column(...) def as_dict(self): obj_d = { 'field1': self.field1, 'field2': self.field2, ... } return obj_dThen in your view:
foos = Foo.query.all()results = [ foo.as_dict() for foo in foos ]return jsonify({count: len(results), results: results)Based on your application you can make as_dict smarter by converting fields (notably datetime fileds) in javascript friendly formats or adding convenient fields like following a relationship.