Python Proper JSON Format

Question

I need to post data to a REST API. One field, incident_type , needs to be passed in the below JSON format ( must include brackets, can't be just curly brackets ):

"incident_type_ids": [{
    "name": "Phishing - General"
}],

When I try to force this in my code, it doesn't come out quite right. There will usually be some extra quote-escapes ( ex. output: "incident_type_ids": "[\\\\"{ name : Phishing - General }\\\\"]" )and I realized that was because I was double-encoding the JSON data in the incident type variable to forcibly add the brackets ( in line 6 which has since been commented out ):

#incident variables
name = 'Incident Name 2'
description = 'This is the description'
corpID = 'id'
incident_type = '{ name : Phishing - General }'
#incident_type = json.dumps([incident_type])
incident_owner = 'Security Operations Center'

payload = {
        'name':name,
        'discovered_date':'0',
        'owner_id':incident_owner,
        'description':description,
        'exposure_individual_name':corpID,
        'incident_type_ids':incident_type
    }
body=json.dumps(payload)
create = s.post(url, data=body, headers=headers, verify=False)

However since I commented out the line, I can't get incident_type in the format I need ( with brackets ).

So, my question is: How can I get the incident_type variable in the proper format in the final payload ?

Input I manually got to work using product's interactive REST API:

{
"name": "Incident Name 2",
"incident_type_ids": [{
    "name": "Phishing - General"
}],
"description": "This is the description",
"discovered_date": "0",
"exposure_individual_name": "id",
"owner_id": "Security Operations Center"
}

I figure my approach is wrong and I'd appreciate any help. I'm new to Python so I'm expecting this is a beginner's mistake.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

JSON square brackets are for arrays, which correspond to Python lists. JSON curly braces are for objects, which correspond to Python dictionaries.

So you need to create a list containing a dictionary, then convert that to JSON.

incident_type = [{"name": "Phishing - General"}]
incident_owner = 'Security Operations Center'

payload = {
        'name':name,
        'discovered_date':'0',
        'owner_id':incident_owner,
        'description':description,
        'exposure_individual_name':corpID,
        'incident_type_ids':incident_type
    }
body=json.dumps(payload)

It's only slightly coincidental that the Python syntax for this is similar to the JSON syntax.