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

Here is a solution that lets you select the relations you want to include in your output as deep as you would like to go. NOTE: This is a complete re-write taking a dict/str as an arg rather than a list. fixes some stuff..

def deep_dict(self, relations={}):
    """Output a dict of an SA object recursing as deep as you want.

    Takes one argument, relations which is a dictionary of relations we'd
    like to pull out. The relations dict items can be a single relation
    name or deeper relation names connected by sub dicts

    Example:
        Say we have a Person object with a family relationship
            person.deep_dict(relations={'family':None})
        Say the family object has homes as a relation then we can do
            person.deep_dict(relations={'family':{'homes':None}})
            OR
            person.deep_dict(relations={'family':'homes'})
        Say homes has a relation like rooms you can do
            person.deep_dict(relations={'family':{'homes':'rooms'}})
            and so on...
    """
    mydict =  dict((c, str(a)) for c, a in
                    self.__dict__.items() if c != '_sa_instance_state')
    if not relations:
        # just return ourselves
        return mydict

    # otherwise we need to go deeper
    if not isinstance(relations, dict) and not isinstance(relations, str):
        raise Exception("relations should be a dict, it is of type {}".format(type(relations)))

    # got here so check and handle if we were passed a dict
    if isinstance(relations, dict):
        # we were passed deeper info
        for left, right in relations.items():
            myrel = getattr(self, left)
            if isinstance(myrel, list):
                mydict[left] = [rel.deep_dict(relations=right) for rel in myrel]
            else:
                mydict[left] = myrel.deep_dict(relations=right)
    # if we get here check and handle if we were passed a string
    elif isinstance(relations, str):
        # passed a single item
        myrel = getattr(self, relations)
        left = relations
        if isinstance(myrel, list):
            mydict[left] = [rel.deep_dict(relations=None)
                                 for rel in myrel]
        else:
            mydict[left] = myrel.deep_dict(relations=None)

    return mydict

so for an example using person/family/homes/rooms... turning it into json all you need is

json.dumps(person.deep_dict(relations={'family':{'homes':'rooms'}}))