Omitting fields when serializing

Is it possible to omit fields when to_dict or to_json is invoked? My use-case is I have fields with sensitive information that I only want available to the internal parts of my application, and would like to ensure they’re never pushed to my end-users.

Right now, I’m accomplishing it by overriding to_dict as follows:

@dataclass
class MyObject(DataClassJsonMixin):
    """An object."""

    id_: uuid.UUID = field(metadata=config(field_name="id"))
    name: str
    secret: str
    another_secret: str

    def to_dict(  # type: ignore[override]
        self, omit_sensitive=True, **kwargs
    ) -> Dict[str, "dataclasses_json.core.Json"]:
        """Serialize the dataclass, with an optional ability to omit sensitive/internal fields."""
        serialized = super().to_dict(**kwargs)
        if omit_sensitive:
            for field_name in list(serialized.keys()):
                if field_name in ("secret", "another_secret"):
                    del serialized[field_name]
        return serialized

Ideally, this would be something I could define as part of the field(). Is this currently possible with dataclass-json, and, if not, would this be something that you would consider for future functionality?

[jcmuddle]

Thank you @arusahni, this worked perfectly for my use-case. Thank you @lidatong for the great package.

[RunOrVeith]

I don’t think dropping everything that has None as default is the best solution to this problem. I think a better solution would add something like

secret_stuff: Optional[str] = field(default=None, metadata=config(drop_on_export=True))