JSON Serializing Django Models with simplejson

Question

I would go with extending simplejson. Basically, you want to plug in django’s serialization when the JSON encoder encounters a QuerySet. You could use something like:

from json import dumps, loads, JSONEncoder

from django.core.serializers import serialize
from django.db.models.query import QuerySet
from django.utils.functional import curry

class DjangoJSONEncoder(JSONEncoder):
    def default(self, obj):
        if isinstance(obj, QuerySet):
            # `default` must return a python serializable
            # structure, the easiest way is to load the JSON
            # string produced by `serialize` and return it
            return loads(serialize('json', obj))
        return JSONEncoder.default(self,obj)

# partial function, we can now use dumps(my_dict) instead
# of dumps(my_dict, cls=DjangoJSONEncoder)
dumps = curry(dumps, cls=DjangoJSONEncoder)

For more info on default method, have a look at simplejson documentation. Put that in a python module, then import dumps and you’re good to go. But note that this function will only help you serializing QuerySet instances, not Model instances directly.

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