Serializers

Rick provides serializers for converting Python objects to and from various data formats. The serializer module offers extended support for complex Python types that standard serializers don't handle natively.

Overview

Serializers in Rick extend standard serialization libraries with support for:

• datetime.date and datetime.datetime objects
• decimal.Decimal for precise numeric operations
• uuid.UUID objects
• Dataclasses with nested support
• Custom Python objects with __dict__ attributes
• Memoryview and bytes objects

Available Serializers

Rick currently provides two serializers:

• JSON Serializer - Extended JSON encoding with support for Python types
• MessagePack Serializer - Binary serialization and deserialization with custom type extensions

Common Use Cases

API Responses

from rick.serializer.json import ExtendedJsonEncoder
import json

data = {
    'user_id': uuid.uuid4(),
    'created_at': datetime.datetime.now(),
    'balance': decimal.Decimal('123.45')
}

# Serialize for API response
response = json.dumps(data, cls=ExtendedJsonEncoder)

Data Caching

from rick.serializer.msgpack import msgpack

# Serialize for cache storage
cached_data = msgpack.packb(complex_object)

# Deserialize from cache
restored_data = msgpack.unpackb(cached_data)

Configuration with Custom Types

from rick.serializer.json import ExtendedJsonEncoder
import json

config = {
    'api_key': uuid.uuid4(),
    'timeout': decimal.Decimal('30.5'),
    'last_updated': datetime.datetime.now()
}

# Save configuration
with open('config.json', 'w') as f:
    json.dump(config, f, cls=ExtendedJsonEncoder, indent=2)

Type Support

Type	JSON	MessagePack
datetime.date	ISO string	Binary extension
datetime.datetime	ISO string	Binary extension
decimal.Decimal	String	String in extension
uuid.UUID	String	16-byte binary
Dataclass	Dict	Dict with class info
Custom objects	Dict	Dict with reconstruction
Memoryview	UTF-8 string	Binary
bytes	UTF-8 string	Binary