How do you serialize a model instance in Django

Question

There is a lot of documentation on how to serialize a Model QuerySet but how do you just serialize to JSON the fields of a Model Instance?

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

If you're dealing with a list of model instances the best you can do is using serializers.serialize(), it gonna fit your need perfectly.

However, you are to face an issue with trying to serialize a single object, not a list of objects. That way, in order to get rid of different hacks, just use Django's model_to_dict (if I'm not mistaken, serializers.serialize() relies on it, too):

from django.forms.models import model_to_dict

# assuming obj is your model instance
dict_obj = model_to_dict( obj )

You now just need one straight json.dumps call to serialize it to json:

import json
serialized = json.dumps(dict_obj)

Hope it helps!!

Thank you!