Custom JSON Encoder in Django

I have been messing around with how to display date formats (in questions and answers) for my web based learning site from the past couple days. After trying various things, I settled for what seems to be a web 2.0 standard for displaying dates - displaying dates as '2 days 4 hours ago' instead of the actual date and time '4th August, 2009 5:50 PM'. I like this because I do not have to deal with any browser localization issues. Everything is a delta between the UTC time a question was asked and the current UTC time (btw if you are working with datetime in Python, do read this blog post).

In my Django based application, I use JQuery to get questions and answers for forums on every topic page. The application sends back JSON to the Javascript functions which display the questions and answers from the JSON objects.

The DjangoJSONEncoder (scroll to the end of this module) provided by Django serializes dates in a specific format. I wanted to change this so that a date would be serialized as '2 days ago'.

A bit of Googling bought me to Jessy's very nice blog post, which explained very nicely how to create a custom Encoder to be used for serializing objects in Python. This seemed like a good idea, so I wrote my custom encoder to change the way dates are displayed;

class Web20DatesEncoder(DjangoJSONEncoder):
  SECONDS_IN_HR = 60 * 60
  SECONDS_IN_MIN = 60
  def default(self, object):
    if isinstance(object, datetime.datetime):
      delta = datetime.datetime.now() - object
      return self.get_delta_as_string(delta)
    else:
      return super(Web20DatesEncoder, self).default(object)

  def get_delta_as_string(self, delta):
    days = delta.days
    seconds = delta.seconds
    hours = 0
    minutes = 0
    hours = seconds / self.SECONDS_IN_HR
    seconds = seconds % self.SECONDS_IN_HR
    minutes = seconds / self.SECONDS_IN_MIN
    seconds = seconds % self.SECONDS_IN_MIN
    delta_str = ''
    if days > 0:
      delta_str += str(days) + ' days, '
    if hours > 0:
      delta_str += str(hours) + ' hours, '
    if days <= 0 and seconds > 0:
      delta_str += str(seconds) + ' secs, '
    return delta_str

However, I could not figure out how to hook this class into the call chain so that it is used when my QuerySet is serialized as such;

res = serializers.serialize(”json”, questions)

One solution which came up was to use the 'cls' parameter in the call to serialize.

res = serializers.serialize(”json”, questions, cls=Web20DatesEncoder)

However, when I ran my code, there was an error:

dump() got multiple values for keyword argument ‘cls’

Why do we get this error? Maybe (I still do understand Python well enough to be sure) because, the end_serialization method in django.core.Serializers.json.Serializer has the following line:

simplejson.dump(self.objects, self.stream, cls=DjangoJSONEncoder, **self.options)

As you can see it specifically passes cls=DjangoJSONEncoder to simplejson.dump(...), and this is the reason why we get the above error message.

Now I do not know what is the right way to resolve this issue, but here's how I did it. I created a subclass of JSONSerializer, such that my subclass used my custom encoder.

from django.core.serializers.json import Serializer as JSONSerializer

class DateModifyingJSONSerializer(JSONSerializer):
  def end_serialization(self):
    self.options.pop('stream', None)
    self.options.pop('fields', None)
    simplejson.dump(self.objects, self.stream, cls=Web20DatesEncoder, **self.options)

and the client code which earlier instantiated JSONSerializer now uses DateModifyingJSONSerializer.

#Here is the code snippet which uses the above class
json_serializer = DateModifyingJSONSerializer()
res = json_serializer.serialize(query_set)

#instead of old code shown below
#serializers.get_serializer("json")()
#res = json_serializer.serialize(query_set)

I hope you find this solution useful. Please leave a comment if it helped you, or if you know a better way to perform this task.