Importing and exporting data with admin integration.

django-import-export is a Django application and library for importing and exporting data with included admin integration.

Latest version :

django-import-export release v3 is currently in beta (pypi)

Features:

support multiple formats (Excel, CSV, JSON, etc) read more from official docs
admin integration for importing/exporting
preview import changes
export data respecting admin filters

Installation

pip install django-import-export

specific version can be installed by specifying the version.

pip install django-import-export==3.0.0b4

Configuration

Add the package to INSTALLED_APPS on settings.py

# settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'import_export',
)

Collect statics to support styling in django admin panel.

python manage.py collectstatic

Integrating to admin panel

We need to define a Resources class that refers to a model in which we want to enable import export.

# admin.py

from import_export import resources

class BlogResource(resources.ModelResource):
    class Meta:
    	model = Blog

Now we can register the model to admin with admin.register

#admin.py
from import_export.admin import ImportExportModelAdmin

class BlogAdmin(ImportExportModelAdmin):
    resource_class = BlogResource

admin.site.register(Blog, BlogAdmin)

Full code looks like this

from django.contrib import admin
from apps.blog.models import Blog
from import_export import resources
from import_export.admin import ImportExportModelAdmin

# Register your models here.

class BlogResource(resources.ModelResource):
    class Meta:
        model = Blog

class BlogAdmin(ImportExportModelAdmin):
    resource_class = BlogResource

admin.site.register(Blog, BlogAdmin)

That's it. Here are some screenshot to verify our configuration.

Here we can see that we can export on various formats. Similarly we can import on various formats. Furthermore we can use the import and export functionality programmatically as well.
Let's see an example to export using the shell. Fire up the shell by

python3 manage.py shell

We can do this by reusing the BlogResource that we added on admin.py file.

from apps.blog.admin import BlogResource
dataset = BlogResource().export()
print(dataset.csv)

This will print the exported data in csv format

id,author,poster,title,caption,slug,tags,markdown_body,series,views,is_archived,is_featured,created_at,updated_at
3,1,,sdfsd,sdfsdfsd,sdfs,1,sdfsd,,60,0,0,2022-08-20 10:05:19,2022-08-27 11:18:08
1,1,uploads/299496744_5438537262880214_6238834739525833684_n.jpeg,Title 1,some good caption,good-caption,1,"# THis is heading
## subheading

body text[![](http://localhost:8000/media/editor/IMG_20180219_152316_20220825111743599583.jpeg)](http://localhost:8000)

some `code` hightlight checking",,225,0,0,2022-08-20 10:04:48,2022-08-26 20:50:41
2,1,uploads/1660795538413.jpeg,Tittle 2,Tittle 2,sss,1,sdfsdf,,4,0,0,2022-08-20 10:05:08,2022-08-25 21:47:41

That's a wrap

Please do follow the official docs for more information. Thank you for reading this article.
Any feedback/comment/suggestions to improve the articles are welcomed!

Happy Learning!