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

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