Do parameters with API calls have to be a dictionary data type when calling device performance?

[LFull]

I am trying to retrieve my devices performance with the python api call 

result = devices_controller.get_network_device_performance(collect)

For some reason when I populate the collect dictionary and call this api I get the error: 

raise APIException('HTTP response not OK.', context)
meraki.exceptions.api_exception.APIException: HTTP response not OK.

But when I convert the dictionary (collect) to a string I get no error, but also no performance data

What could be causing this error and what other approaches could I use to try and get the performance data from the network devices.

Many Thanks!

[BAllen]

They need to be JSON.

[LFull]

Could you please expand on this?

The code is from meraki: here

The code works for a section of devices and networks but then stops and throws the error in my original question

[mciecior]

I've worked through this example with the Python SDK and can't reproduce your error.  It might help if we could see the HTTP response that is considered invalid - that should give us some more clues.  Can you catch the exception and display the context?  I'm not sure what format the context takes, I'd try all these:

try:
 result = devices_controller.get_network_device_performance(collect)
catch APIException as e:
  print(e)
  print(e.context)
  print(e['context'])

[mciecior]

I can't tell if the error is related to the content you're sending, or in parsing the response.

I've been doing this to send dicts using the requests module:

payload = {
           "roomId": roomId,
           "personId": personId
          }
resp = requests.post(..., payload = payload)

I've been doing this to convert my HTTP responses into Python-native dicts:

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

#This is a string
type(response.text)

import json
res = json.loads(response.text)

#This is now a dict
type(res)