I'm trying to load JSON back into an object. The "loads" method seems to work without error, but the object doesn't seem to have the properties I expect.
How can I go about examining/inspecting the object that I have (this is web-based code).
results = {"Subscriber": {"firstname": "Neal", "lastname": "Walters"}}
subscriber = json.loads(results)
for item in inspect.getmembers(subscriber):
self.response.out.write("<BR>Item")
for subitem in item:
self.response.out.write("<BR> SubItem=" + subitem)
The attempt above returned this:
Item
SubItem=__class__
I don't think it matters, but for context: The JSON is actually coming from a urlfetch in Google App Engine to a rest web service created using this utility: http://code.google.com/p/appengine-rest-server. The data is being retrieved from a datastore with this definition:
class Subscriber(db.Model):
firstname = db.StringProperty()
lastname = db.StringProperty()
Thanks, Neal
Update #1: Basically I'm trying to deserialize JSON back into an object. In theory it was serialized from an object, and I want to now get it back into an object. Maybe the better question is how to do that?
Update #2: I was trying to abstract a complex program down to a few lines of code, so I made a few mistakes in "pseudo-coding" it for purposes of posting here.
Here's a better code sample, now take out of website where I can run on PC.
results = '{"Subscriber": {"firstname": "Neal", "lastname": "Walters"}}'
subscriber = json.loads(results)
for key, value in subscriber.items():
print " %s: %s" %(key, value)
The above runs, what it displays doesn't look any more structured than the JSON string itself. It displays this: Subscriber: {u'lastname': u'Walters', u'firstname': u'Neal'}
I have more of a Microsoft background, so when I hear serialize/deserialize, I think going from an object to a string, and from a string back to an object. So if I serialize to JSON, and then deserialize, what do I get, a dictionary, a list, or an object? Actually, I'm getting the JSON from a REST webmethod, that is on my behalf serializing my object for me.
Ideally I want a subscriber object that matches my Subscriber class above, and ideally, I don't want to write one-off custom code (i.e. code that would be specific to "Subscriber"), because I would like to do the same thing with dozens of other classes. If I have to write some custom code, I will need to do it generically so it will work with any class.
Update #3: This is to explain more of why I think this is a needed tool. I'm writing a huge app, probably on Google App Engine (GAE). We are leaning toward a REST architecture for several reasons, but one is that our web GUI should access the data store via a REST web layer. (I'm a lot more used to SOAP, so switching to REST is a small challenge in itself). So one of the classic ways of getting and update data is through a business or data tier. By using the REST utility mention above, I have the choice of XML or JSON. I'm hoping to do a small working prototype of both before we develop the huge app). Then, suppose we have a successful app, and GAE doubles it prices. Then we can rewrite just the data tier, and take our Python/Django user tier (web code), and run it on Amazon or somewhere else.
If I'm going to do all that, why would I want everything to be dictionary objects. Wouldn't I want the power of full-blown class structure? One of the next tricks is sort of an object relational mapping (ORM) so that we don't necessarily expose our exact data tables, but more of a logical layer.
We also want to expose a RESTful API to paying users, who might be using any language. For them, they can use XML or JSON, and they wouldn't use the serialize routine discussed here.
json only encodes strings, floats, integers, javascript objects (python dicts) and lists.
You have to create a function to turn the returned dictionary into a class and then pass it to a
json.loads
using theobject_hook
keyword argument along with the json string. Heres some code that fleshes it out:This will handle any class that can be instantiated without arguments to the constructor and for which
setattr
will work.Also, this uses
json
. I have no experience withsimplejson
so YMMV but I hear that they are identical.Note that although the values for the two subscriber objects are identical, the resulting objects are not. This could be fixed by memoizing the
decode_from_dict
class.