The Looker SDK failed with a 'Bad JSON: Unterminated string starting at...' error, but the same request worked via a direct API call.

[sagarsalvi2011]

We currently use looker-sdk==23.0.0 and cattr==23.1.2, and we’ve encountered an issue when calling the dashboard API for some dashboards. Specifically, we receive the following error:

API: /api/4.0/dashboards/23970?fields=id%2Ctitle%2Cdashboard_elements%2Cdashboard_filters%2Cdeleted%2Chidden%2Cdescription%2Cfolder%2Cuser_id%2Ccreated_at%2Cupdated_at%2Clast_updater_id%2Cdeleted_at%2Cdeleter_id
Error: Bad JSON - Unterminated string starting at: line 1 column 4535253 (char 4535252)

https://github.com/looker-open-source/sdk-codegen/blob/main/python/looker_sdk/rtl/serialize.py#L68

    return self.client.dashboard(
  File "/tmp/venv-looker-5a88e710ab336a26/lib/python3.10/site-packages/looker_sdk/sdk/api40/methods.py", line 4670, in dashboard
    self.get(
  File "/tmp/venv-looker-5a88e710ab336a26/lib/python3.10/site-packages/looker_sdk/rtl/api_methods.py", line 149, in get
    return self._return(response, structure)
  File "/tmp/venv-looker-5a88e710ab336a26/lib/python3.10/site-packages/looker_sdk/rtl/api_methods.py", line 106, in _return
    ret = self.deserialize(data=value, structure=structure)  # type: ignore
  File "/tmp/venv-looker-5a88e710ab336a26/lib/python3.10/site-packages/looker_sdk/rtl/serialize.py", line 68, in deserialize
    raise DeserializeError(f"Bad json {ex}")

Interestingly, it works as expected when we use the requests library to call the same API. I have verified that the data is correct when accessing the API directly, yet it fails when using the SDK.

Could you please help us resolve this issue?

[drstrangelooker]

Can you confirm this is an issue with the latest versions of the SDK?

[Rkohn123]

Hello, same error, with the latest versions and the 23.16.0. I've tried with these 2 versions.

[drstrangelooker]

I can't reproduce the problem here.

At 4.5 million characters that seems to be a huge dashboard. I would try using the fields parameter to limit the fields returned to a smaller set and work from there to see if that is the problem. At the moment I'm not sure if this is a something that we can modify in the SDK, but I'm looking into it.