feature: stable as_json

[patrick91]

Hi there! I have not investigated this much, but looks like using as_json doesn't always return the same data (or at least not in the same order) see this diff: strawberry-graphql/strawberry.rocks@fc70f2a

For my use case I'll do some sorting, but I was wondering if this could be a feature of Griffe 😊

[pawamoy]

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Ouch 😅

Yes that's a good idea, we can probably use json.dumps(..., sort_keys=True) 🙂

[patrick91]

@pawamoy I was using sort_keys, but then the order of the members would change too, not sure why :D

[pawamoy]

Ah 🤔 I'll investigate. Members order should definitely stay the same. Unless you're using dynamic analysis and inspect.getmembers doesn't return members in the same order every time 🤔

[pawamoy]

Can you tell me (again? sorry if I forgot) how you dump and reload the data? Or just point me at the code you're using to dump/load?

[pawamoy]

I can't replicate the members dis-ordering issue across multiple invocations of Griffe 🤔

[pawamoy]

Note that members are dumped in the order they are found in the sources. If you move objects around, the order in the JSON dump will also change 🙂 Maybe we shouldn't do that and sort alphabetically instead, since we either:

• have line numbers information and therefore can sort again as found in sources
• don't have line numbers information and that means sources could not be found, so source order doesn't make sense

By the way this source ordering is completely implicit and relies on default ordering of Python dicts since Python 3.7 (I think it's 3.7).

And if we don't need the initial, implicit order of members, maybe we can even stop using a list and use a dict when dumping them instead 🤷 That would by the way make the JSON more readable (for example, no need to expand an item in Firefox to see the member's name, all names would be displayed right there in the tree without having to expand anything).