serialization only works for iterable objects

[Andrea Zilio]

This works:

from django.core import serializers
data = serializers.serialize("json", SomeModel.objects.all())

This doesn't and throws TypeError:'SomeModel' object is not iterable:

from django.core import serializers
data = serializers.serialize("json", SomeModel.objects.get(pk=1))

I think that should be possible to serialize single objects too.

(Es: I often need to serialize a object, or better... some fields of a single object when implementing ajax views)

[Karen Tracey]

It's trivially easy do this in your calling code:

from django.core import serializers
data = serializers.serialize("json", [SomeModel.objects.get(pk=1)])

I don't see why the code/doc for serializers.serialize should be made more complicated just to handle this.

[Andrea Zilio]

Replying to kmtracey:

It's trivially easy do this in your calling code:

from django.core import serializers
data = serializers.serialize("json", [SomeModel.objects.get(pk=1)])

I don't see why the code/doc for serializers.serialize should be made more complicated just to handle this.

Because the resulting json string does not represent an object but an array of one single object and I don't see why the code/doc of the client side javascript should be made more complicated just to handle an array when expecting an object ;)

[Oroku Saki]

@kmtracy I might be overstepping my bounds (ie, feel free to slap me in the face and re-close this ticket if I am), but I strongly agree with epper. It's easy to use one object in a list but then you have to either iterate through the object (with only one iteration) or use your JavaScript to pull out the one object like my_object[0] over and over again (DRY comes to mind). I would suggest that if an object (instead of a QuerySet) is passed into the method that the output reflect this as well. It just seems right. When it comes to an API (JSON in my case) it's all about clean code and clean output.

[Karen Tracey]

Please don't reopen wontfixed issues without first gaining some consensus for it on the development list. See: ​http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing/#id1.