Return proper JSON from Django JsonResponse

Question

My Model:

class Person(models.Model):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    phone = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    email = models.EmailField()

My View:

def users(request):
    people = Person.objects.all()
    data = serializers.serialize('json', people)
    return JsonResponse(data, safe=False)

All I want back is the data in JSON format. What I'm getting back is this:

"[{\"model\": \"myapp.person\", \"pk\": 1, \"fields\": {\"first_name\": \"ahmet\", \"last_name\": \"arsan\", \"phone\": \"xxx-xxx-xxxx\", \"email\": \"aarsan@xxxxxxxx.com\"}}]"

While technically that is valid JSON, there are 2 problems (for me) with this response:

1. I don't want those double quotes escaped.
2. I don't need the model name (myapp.person).

I don't know if/what I'm doing wrong, but it seems like something is off here. Perhaps my query should be returning a dict but I don't know how to get it to do that. I am using Django 1.10.1, Python 3.4.

Answer 1

You already have an answer, but what you're doing wrong is double encoding. JsonResponse serialises to json, but you already have json as that's what's returned from the serialiser.

Either serialise to "python" or use a standard HttpResponse.

Answer 2

I am assuming you are asking this question for an API response. I would suggest using Rest Framework for that as it makes things very easy. You can select your own fields by writing your own serializers for the model.

from rest_framework import serializers

class PersonSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Person
        fields = ('first_name', 'last_name', 'phone', 'email')