ckanapi-exporter 0.0.1

Export dataset metadata from CKAN to Excel

An API client (usable as a command-line script or as a Python library) for exporting dataset metadata from CKAN sites to Excel-compatible CSV files.

This is a thin wrapper around [losser](https://github.com/ckan/losser), hooking it up to the CKAN API.

TODO: Document the preprocessing of dataset extras.

Requirements

Python 2.7, or 2.6 with the argparse library.

Installation

To install run:

pip install ckanapi-exporter

To install for development, create and activate a Python virtual environment then do:

git clone https://github.com/ckan/ckanapi-exporter.git cd ckanapi-exporter python setup.py develop

Usage

From the command line:

ckanapi-exporter –url ‘http://demo.ckan.org’ –columns columns.json > output.csv

This will:

1. Fetch metadata for all datasets from demo.ckan.org

2. Transform and filter the datasets according to the columns specified in columns.json

3. Write the result as UTF8-encoded, CSV-formatted text to output.csv

TODO: Document the columns.json file format.

Using as a Python library:

import ckanapi_exporter.exporter as exporter csv_string = exporter.export(’http://demo.ckan.org’, ‘columns.json’)

Returns a UTF8-encoded string.

The second argument can be either the filename of the columns.json file as a string, or a list of dictionaries (equivalent to the contents of columns.json file after loading the JSON).