Question

I want to put a Django model in de response for my Ajax request. Currently I have this in my views.py:

def get_account(request, account_id):

    try:
        account = Account.objects.get(pk=account_id)
        success = True
        error_message = None
    except Account.DoesNotExist:
        success = False
        error_message = 'This account does not exist'

    results = {
        'success': success,
        'error_message': error_message,
    }

    return HttpResponse(
        json.dumps(results),
        mimetype='application/json')

I would like to add the account model to the results dict. account.__dict__ won’t do because it will have references to other objects in it.

I found de django serialize function, which serializes it exactly how I want it, only it makes a Json string directly, so I’ll end up with a Json string inside a Json object (bad for bandwith if you have large models, because the Json string get’s escaped all over). So then I would need to json_decode it another time in Javascript.

Also, the django serialize function only accepts lists of objects, so I would have to make a list with only one object, and when I unserialize it take the first value of the list (which isn’t a super big problem, but it adds up to the pile).

It would be great if you could serialize a model to just a python dict. Then you can do anything with it as you like.

Anyone ever got the same problem? How did you solve it?

Answer 1

With the help of Daniel’s answer I was able to do it:

def get_account_data(account):
    fields = serializers.serialize('python', [account, ])[0]['fields']
    return {field: str(fields[field]) for field in fields}

Because I’m sending it over Ajax, I needed everything to be a string. If you serialize using the ‘python’ method, some things like a datetime field will have a function in it (like datetime.date(2012, 12, 23)). This function makes a dict with only string values.