NDB to_dict method ignores properties defined with @property decorator

Question

My NDB data model looks like this

class Foo(ndb.Model):
    created = ndb.DateTimeProperty(auto_now_add=True)
    # some other properties

    @property
    def readable_created(self):
        return readble_time(self.created)

where readable_time returns some readable version of a DateTime (e.g. '2 days ago'). Thanks to the @property decorator, I can easily access it as myinstance.readable_created. I would like to use NDB's Model.to_dict() method to turn the data into a dictionary, say for writing it to a template. However, readable_created is ignored by this method and myinstance.to_dict(include=['readable_created']) returns {}.

It's the first time I use the @property decorator, so maybe I missed something? Is there an easy way around this? Is this a bug?

The approach from ndb to_dict method does not include object's key works, but there should be an easier way.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is by design. Some templating engines let you access attributes directly, so you won't need to use to_dict() at all (as Tim Hoffman pointed out).