👀 Views: 0 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-09-09

python api serialization dictionary Python

I'm trying to implement I've hit a wall trying to I'm upgrading from an older version and I've tried everything I can think of but I've been banging my head against this for hours..... I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. Currently developing a microservices architecture where multiple services need to communicate through a REST API. One of the challenges I’m facing involves serializing dictionaries that contain complex nested structures before sending them over the wire. The API expects unique keys, but I have encountered scenarios where the same key could appear in different nested dictionaries. For example, consider the following dictionary structure: ```python payload = { 'user': { 'id': 123, 'name': 'Alice', 'roles': [ {'role': 'admin', 'permissions': ['read', 'write']}, {'role': 'editor', 'permissions': ['read']} ] }, 'action': 'update', 'timestamp': '2023-10-10T12:00:00Z' } ``` In this case, if I need to include another user or role in the payload, I might end up with a situation where keys collide during serialization. I've tried using the `json` module’s `dumps` method, but it doesn’t handle duplicate keys well and raises an error. I also explored the `orjson` library since it promises better performance and flexibility, but that doesn't solve the issue of duplicate keys either. One approach I considered is transforming the structure into a list of tuples, ensuring uniqueness, but that complicates how the data is processed on the receiving end. Here’s a snippet attempting to handle uniqueness manually: ```python unique_payload = {k: v for k, v in payload.items() if k not in seen_keys and not (seen_keys.add(k) or False)} ``` This doesn’t work reliably when the same key is valid in different contexts. Are there established patterns or libraries that address serialization of such complex dictionary structures while maintaining unique key constraints? Any suggestions on best practices or libraries that could facilitate this integration would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! My development environment is macOS. What am I doing wrong? I'm working on a CLI tool that needs to handle this. Thanks in advance! This is part of a larger mobile app I'm building. I'm working in a Linux environment. What are your experiences with this? What would be the recommended way to handle this?