Flask and handeling a Zeep response with datetime

Question

I'm calling a SOAP WebService using Zeep, and it returns a JSON-like response with a datetime object. I want to write a micro-service using Flask and return proper JSON response. However, Flask complains that:

TypeError: Object of type datetime is not JSON serializable

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api
import datetime

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app)

class foo(Resource):
    def get(self, x):
        zeepResponse = {
            'Response': {
                'Number': x,
                'DateTime': datetime.datetime(2020, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0),
                'Other': None
            }
        }
        return zeepResponse

api.add_resource(foo, '/post/<int:x>')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

To test from the command line, simply run:

% curl http://localhost:5000/post/911

Would you guide me how to convert zeepResponse (and the datetime specifically) to a proper JSON serializable structure?

Answer 1

Calling json.dumps(zeepResponse, default=str) seems to fix my problem. From Stack Overflow 11875770

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api
import datetime
import json

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app)

class foo(Resource):
    def get(self, x):
        zeepResponse = {
            'Response': {
                'Number': x,
                'DateTime': datetime.datetime(2020, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0),
                'Other': None
            }
        }
        return json.loads(json.dumps(zeepResponse, default=str))

api.add_resource(foo, '/post/<int:x>')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)