General Usage

To use a serializer, create a SerializationMiddleware instance with the storage class you want to use and register the serializers you want to use. Then you pass the middleware instance as the storage to TinyDB:

>>> from tinydb import TinyDB, Query
>>> from tinydb.storages import JSONStorage
>>> from tinydb_serialization import SerializationMiddleware
>>> from tinydb_serialization.serializers import DateTimeSerializer
>>>
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>>
>>> serialization = SerializationMiddleware(JSONStorage)
>>> serialization.register_serializer(DateTimeSerializer(), 'TinyDate')
>>>
>>> db = TinyDB('db.json', storage=serialization)
>>> db.insert({'date': datetime(2000, 1, 1, 12, 0, 0)})
>>> db.all()
[{'date': datetime.datetime(2000, 1, 1, 12, 0)}]
>>> query = Query()
>>> db.insert({'date': datetime(2010, 1, 1, 12, 0, 0)})
>>> db.search(query.date > datetime(2005, 1, 1))
[{'date': datetime.datetime(2010, 1, 1, 12, 0)}]

Important: A SerializationMiddleware instance always wraps a database’s storage. This means that the SerializationMiddleware instance cannot be shared between multiple TinyDB instances as they would use the same underlying storage instance and thus share all data between both instances.

Provided Serializers

• tinydb_serialization.serializers.DateTimeSerializer: serializes datetime objects as ISO 8601 formatted strings

• tinydb_serialization.serializers.DateSerializer: serializes date objects as ISO 8601 formatted strings

Creating Custom Serializers

In this example we implement a serializer for datetime objects (like the one provided by this package):

from datetime import datetime
from tinydb_serialization import Serializer

class DateTimeSerializer(Serializer):
    OBJ_CLASS = datetime  # The class this serializer handles

    def encode(self, obj):
        return obj.isoformat()

    def decode(self, s):
        return datetime.fromisoformat(s)

v2.2.0 (2024-10-05)

• Include the DateSerializer in this package (see issue #16)

v2.1.1 (2023-07-24)

• Fix VSCode Pylance type error (see pull request #14)

• Add support for storages that encode as binary strings (see pull request #17)

• Drop Python 3.7 support

v2.1.0 (2021-01-23)

• Include the DateTimeSerializer in this package (see issue #10)

• Drop Python 3.6 support (as 3.7 is needed for date parsing)

v2.0.0 (2020-05-26)

• Add TinyDB v4.0.0 support (see pull request #9)

v1.0.4 (2017-03-27)

• Don’t modify the original element if it contains a list (see pull request #5)

v1.0.3 (2016-02-11)

• Handle nested data (nested dicts, lists) properly when serializing/deserializing (see pull request #3)

v1.0.2 (2016-01-04)

• Don’t destroy original data when serializing (see pull request #2)

v1.0.1 (2015-11-17)

• Fix installation via pip (see issue #1)

v1.0.0 (2015-09-27)

• Initial release on PyPI