Objects are not JSON serializable

[tdorsey]

server = PlexServer()

json.dumps(server) fails because Servers contain Libraries, which contain Sections, etc.

The easiest thing to do may be to implement custom json encoder/decoders for PlexObject

[Hellowlol]

PR welcome

[pkkid]

This is not something that is in the scope or spirit of this project. You could write helper functions on the side that convert these higher-level objects to dictionaries. Internally in plexapi I would like to keep things simpler and avoid a kitchen sink of features that may very easily become unmaintained.

A PR to add this functionality would have to be very smart to dynamically create the returned dictionaries to be accepted.

I don't know what you're trying to do or why you need to convert all plexapi objects to json, but you could get pretty close by using the builtin server.__dict__() function. If you want to get fancy, you can take a look at how I recursively walked every object in the file tools/plex-listattrs.py.

[Hellowlol]

Or you can use the ElementTree.tostring(obj._data, encoding='utf8', method='xml') to get a xml string then use xmltodict to get a dict then use json dumps

[tdorsey]

@pkkid I'm writing a tool to do library comparisons and in the process of writing the web ui with flask, I tried to store the Library objects in the session as follows

from flask import session 
account = MyPlexAccount()
session['account'] = account

Which failed on behind the scenes JSON Encoding (apparently flask stores both session and the g object as a JSON'ed cookie)

As far as implementation goes, I think I can work around this by just recursively serializing the various dictionaries without much trouble, I just was unsure if this sort of thing should be a helper function on my end, or a PR on yours.

[Hellowlol]

If you write a helper it could be added to the utility.py file. I can see the use case.