A flat implementation
You could use something like this:
from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import DeclarativeMeta
class AlchemyEncoder(json.JSONEncoder):
def default(self, obj):
if isinstance(obj.__class__, DeclarativeMeta):
# an SQLAlchemy class
fields = {}
for field in [x for x in dir(obj) if not x.startswith('_') and x != 'metadata']:
data = obj.__getattribute__(field)
try:
json.dumps(data) # this will fail on non-encodable values, like other classes
fields[field] = data
except TypeError:
fields[field] = None
# a json-encodable dict
return fields
return json.JSONEncoder.default(self, obj)
and then convert to JSON using:
c = YourAlchemyClass()
print json.dumps(c, cls=AlchemyEncoder)