Django JSON Serialization with Mixed Django models and a Dictionary

Question

I can't seem to find a good way to serialize both Django Models and Python dictionaries together, its pretty common for me to return a json response that looks like

{
  "modified":updated_object,
  "success":true
  ... some additional data...
}

Its simple enough to use either simplejson to serialize a dict or Django's serializers.serialize to serialize a model but when I mix them together I get errors.

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Can't you just convert the model instance to a dict, join the other dict and then serialize?

from django.forms import model_to_dict

dict = model_to_dict(instance)
dict.update(dict2)

... Then serialize here ...

Don't know about being "better"... :-)