How to return Sqlalchemy result as JSON?

Question

The Sqlalchemy result can have 0 to many records.

Result is:

record = meta.Session.query(model.EmpsTable).filter(model.EmpsTable
         .firstname.like(searchQuery))

If there was only one record to return I would do:

return {'file_id':record.file_id, 'filename':
         record.filename, 'links_to' :record.url}

I can print the records on terminal like such:

for r in record:
    print r.file_id

But in this case I need to send these multiple records as JSON reply to a JQuery ajax.

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

First thing, don't call record an object that is a query, collection, instrumented sequence/whatever... then you can just get a list of dictionaries.

qry = meta.Session.query(model.EmpsTable).filter(model.EmpsTable
         .firstname.like(searchQuery))

return {'data': [
         {'file_id':record.file_id, 'filename':
            record.filename, 'links_to' :record.url}
        for record in qry
       ]}

To convert the returned object into JSON, you might already have decorated your method for that, or just call json.dumps() over it.

UPDATE: for security reasons, as pointed out by @MrGhimire it's better to wrap the list in a dictionary.