jsonify() ignores the sort order of an OrderedDict

[wmax]

Hi, I would like to know whether this is a bug or a feature.

Example:

from flask import Flask, jsonify
from collections import OrderedDict
app = Flask('__name__')

@app.route('/')
def jsonify_test():
    unsorted_dict = {'foo': 1, 'bar': 4, 'baz': 0}
    sorted_dict = OrderedDict(sorted(unsorted_dict.items(), key=lambda x: x[1]))
    return jsonify(sorted_dict)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug = True)

Result:

{
    "bar": 4, 
    "baz": 0, 
    "foo": 1
}

[ThiefMaster]

JavaScript objects are not ordered. So it's pointless to take the order of an OrderedDict into account when converting it to JSON. If you need the order, jsonify its .items() (which will give you an array of arrays in JS).

[wmax]

Agreed(on the "makes no sense in JS" part).
I've worked around by using a prettified json.dumps() output directly, because I didn't like the sparse rep. of the nested list produced by jsonify().

However I've just noticed that the dict seems to be sorted by "key" after jsonifying, I've tried it with a pretty long list(more then 50 keys) so it doesn't looks like a coincidence.

[iiSeymour]

This is a feature.

By default Flask will serialize JSON objects in a way that the keys are ordered. This is done in order to ensure that independent of the hash seed of the dictionary the return value will be consistent to not trash external HTTP caches. You can override the default behaviour by setting app.config["JSON_SORT_KEYS"] = False.

[obskyr]

Actually, it seems there is a problem with JSON_SORT_KEYS = False too. Even then, it doesn't respect the order of an OrderedDict, and provides the properties in arbitrary order. Surely that isn't intentional?

[ThiefMaster]

This cannot be avoided. Object keys in JS have no order - just like python dict keys. If you need to keep the order you usually need to pass a list of [key, value] lists (e.g. the .items() of the OrderedDict) and then (if needed) build a lookup dict in JS.

AFAIK some engines keep the order for object literals, others don't - AFAIK the standard does not require any specific behavior related to the key order.

[obskyr]

No, I'm talking about the actual literal order in the JSON provided - nothing related to JS. That being arbitrary can definitely be avoided.

[ThiefMaster]

ah.. I guess that depends on whether the json serializer honors the order or not

[dmitrybelyakov]

I think it is worth revisiting this issue at some point since dicts will be ordered in Python 3.7 and actually somewhat are in 3.6