fix: TypeError: Object of type datetime is not JSON serializable

[pnadolny13]

This defaults to string when serializing the input body. In particular it was having issues serializing datetime objects. They now get serialized to a string appropriately instead of causing an exception to be raised.

[michaelnchin]

@pnadolny13 Thanks!

[pnadolny13]

@pnadolny13 Thanks!

@michaelnchin No problem! Happy to help 😄. I dont have merge access, are you able to merge this for me or what is the usual process?

[3coins]

@pnadolny13
Thanks for submitting this fix. Would it be better to limit the default to serializing datetime objects, rather than converting everything to string, some of which cannot be deserialized to JSON?

import datetime
import json

def default(o):
    if isinstance(o, (datetime.date, datetime.datetime)):
        return o.isoformat()

    raise TypeError(f'Cannot serialize object of {type(obj)}')

[pnadolny13]

Would it be better to limit the default to serializing datetime objects

@3coins I'm with that since it still solves the issue I'm seeing!

The downside is that users dont have control over this serialization so they may continue to run into these edge cases. I think their options would then be to either open another PR here to handle their case or first serialize then deserialize their messages to ensure theyre safe before passing them into this library to avoid exceptions. If thats the recommended approach then wouldnt it be better to not accept a list of dicts but instead push the serialization up to the user by accepting a list of message strings? To be fair I'm not very familiar with this code though so this is a bit off the cuff 😄 . I'd defer to you.

[michaelnchin]

...wouldn't it be better to not accept a list of dicts but instead push the serialization up to the user by accepting a list of message strings?

IMO, this would unnecessarily restrict the set of options for dealing with serialization issues. We should let the user decide how their input is modified to compensate when json.dumps() fails. Converting everything to string would be one of several possible solutions here.

Also, note that brute force converting everything to string is risky, as the input may be modified in a way that the model misinterprets it (relative to what the user actually wants). In this respect, using default=str to perform conversions on behalf of the user could potentially cause confusion.