Dataclasses

If you don’t want to use pydantic’s BaseModel you can instead get the same data validation on standard dataclasses (introduced in Python 3.7).

Note

Keep in mind that pydantic.dataclasses.dataclass is a drop-in replacement for dataclasses.dataclass with validation, not a replacement for pydantic.BaseModel (with a small difference in how initialization hooks work). There are cases where subclassing pydantic.BaseModel is the better choice.

For more information and discussion see pydantic/pydantic#710.

You can use all the standard pydantic field types, and the resulting dataclass will be identical to the one created by the standard library dataclass decorator.

The underlying model and its schema can be accessed through __pydantic_model__. Also, fields that require a default_factory can be specified by either a pydantic.Field or a dataclasses.field.

pydantic.dataclasses.dataclass’s arguments are the same as the standard decorator, except one extra keyword argument config which has the same meaning as Config.

Caution

After v1.2, The Mypy plugin must be installed to type check pydantic dataclasses.

For more information about combining validators with dataclasses, see dataclass validators.

Dataclass Config

If you want to modify the Config like you would with a BaseModel, you have three options:

Caution

After v1.10, pydantic dataclasses support Config.extra but some default behaviour of stdlib dataclasses may prevail. For example, when printing a pydantic dataclass with allowed extra fields, it will still use the __str__ method of stdlib dataclass and show only the required fields. This may be improved further in the future.

Nested dataclasses

Nested dataclasses are supported both in dataclasses and normal models.

Dataclasses attributes can be populated by tuples, dictionaries or instances of the dataclass itself.

Stdlib dataclasses and pydantic dataclasses

Convert stdlib dataclasses into pydantic dataclasses

Stdlib dataclasses (nested or not) can be easily converted into pydantic dataclasses by just decorating them with pydantic.dataclasses.dataclass. Pydantic will enhance the given stdlib dataclass but won’t alter the default behaviour (i.e. without validation). It will instead create a wrapper around it to trigger validation that will act like a plain proxy. The stdlib dataclass can still be accessed via the __dataclass__ attribute (see example below).

Choose when to trigger validation

As soon as your stdlib dataclass has been decorated with pydantic dataclass decorator, magic methods have been added to validate input data. If you want, you can still keep using your dataclass and choose when to trigger it.

Inherit from stdlib dataclasses

Stdlib dataclasses (nested or not) can also be inherited and pydantic will automatically validate all the inherited fields.

Use of stdlib dataclasses with BaseModel

Bear in mind that stdlib dataclasses (nested or not) are automatically converted into pydantic dataclasses when mixed with BaseModel! Furthermore the generated pydantic dataclass will have the exact same configuration (order, frozen, …) as the original one.

Use custom types

Since stdlib dataclasses are automatically converted to add validation using custom types may cause some unexpected behaviour. In this case you can simply add arbitrary_types_allowed in the config!

Initialize hooks

When you initialize a dataclass, it is possible to execute code after validation with the help of __post_init_post_parse__. This is not the same as __post_init__, which executes code before validation.

Tip

If you use a stdlib dataclass, you may only have __post_init__ available and wish the validation to be done before. In this case you can set Config.post_init_call = 'after_validation'

Since version v1.0, any fields annotated with dataclasses.InitVar are passed to both __post_init__ and __post_init_post_parse__.

Difference with stdlib dataclasses

Note that the dataclasses.dataclass from Python stdlib implements only the __post_init__ method since it doesn’t run a validation step.

When substituting usage of dataclasses.dataclass with pydantic.dataclasses.dataclass, it is recommended to move the code executed in the __post_init__ method to the __post_init_post_parse__ method, and only leave behind part of code which needs to be executed before validation.

JSON Dumping

Pydantic dataclasses do not feature a .json() function. To dump them as JSON, you will need to make use of the pydantic_encoder as follows: