Serialize the @property methods in a Python class

Question

Is there a way to have any @property definitions passed through to a json serializer when serializing a Django model class?

example:

class FooBar(object.Model)      name = models.CharField(...)      @property     def foo(self):         return "My name is %s" %self.name 

Want to serialize to:

[{      'name' : 'Test User',      'foo' : 'My name is Test User', },] 

Answer 1

You can extend Django's serializers without /too/ much work. Here's a custom serializer that takes a queryset and a list of attributes (fields or not), and returns JSON.

from StringIO import StringIO from django.core.serializers.json import Serializer  class MySerializer(Serializer):     def serialize(self, queryset, list_of_attributes, **options):         self.options = options         self.stream = options.get("stream", StringIO())         self.start_serialization()         for obj in queryset:             self.start_object(obj)             for field in list_of_attributes:                 self.handle_field(obj, field)             self.end_object(obj)         self.end_serialization()         return self.getvalue()      def handle_field(self, obj, field):         self._current[field] = getattr(obj, field) 

Usage:

>>> MySerializer().serialize(MyModel.objects.all(), ["field1", "property2", ...]) 

Of course, this is probably more work than just writing your own simpler JSON serializer, but maybe not more work than your own XML serializer (you'd have to redefine "handle_field" to match the XML case in addition to changing the base class to do that).