RESTful interface in Flask and issues serializing
I would use a module to do this, honestly. We've used Flask-Restless for some APIs, you might take a look at that:
https://flask-restless.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
However, if you want build your own, you can use SQLAlchemy's introspection to output your objects as key/value pairs.
http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/rel_0_7/core/schema.html#metadata-reflection
Something like this, although I always have to triple-check I got the syntax right, so take this as a guide more than working code.
@app.route('/tasks')def tasks(): tasks = Tasks.query.all() output = [] for task in tasks: row = {} for field in Tasks.__table__.c: row[str(field)] = getattr(task, field, None) output.append(row) return jsonify(data=output)I found this question which might help you more. I'm familiar with SQLAlchemy 0.7 and it looks like 0.8 added some nicer introspection techniques:
Flask provides jsonify function to do this. Check out its working here.
Your json_dump method is right though code can be made concise. See this code snippet
@app.route('/tasks')def tasks(): tasks = Tasks.query.all() return jsonify(data=[c.json_dump() for c in tasks])