django-excel 0.0.13

A django middleware that provides one application programminginterface to read and write data in different excel file formats

Support the project

If your company uses pyexcel and its components in a revenue-generating product, please consider supporting the project on GitHub or Patreon. Your financial support will enable me to dedicate more time to coding, improving documentation, and creating engaging content.

Known constraints

Fonts, colors and charts are not supported.

Nor to read password protected xls, xlsx and ods files.

Introduction

Here is a typical conversation between the developer and the user:

     User: "I have uploaded an excel file"
           "but your application says un-supported file format"
Developer: "Did you upload an xlsx file or a csv file?"
     User: "Well, I am not sure. I saved the data using "
           "Microsoft Excel. Surely, it must be in an excel format."
Developer: "OK. Here is the thing. I were not told to support"
           "all available excel formats in day 1. Live with it"
           "or delay the project x number of days."

django-excel is based on pyexcel and makes it easy to consume/produce information stored in excel files over HTTP protocol as well as on file system. This library can turn the excel data into a list of lists, a list of records(dictionaries), dictionaries of lists. And vice versa. Hence it lets you focus on data in Django based web development, instead of file formats.

The idea behind pyexcel originated from a common usability problem: when Excel-driven web applications are delivered to non-developer users (e.g., project assistants, human resources administrators), they often are not aware of the differences between file formats such as CSV, XLS, and XLSX. Rather than training users on these formats, pyexcel provides web developers with a unified interface to handle most Excel file types.

To add support for a specific Excel format in your application, simply install an additional pyexcel plugin—no code changes required. This eliminates issues with different file formats. In the broader community, pyexcel and its associated libraries aim to be a simple, easy-to-install alternative to Pandas, where minimal data manipulation is needed.

The highlighted features are:

1. excel data import into and export from databases

2. turn uploaded excel file directly into Python data structure

3. pass Python data structures as an excel file download

4. provide data persistence as an excel file in server side

5. supports csv, tsv, csvz, tsvz by default and other formats are supported via the following plugins:

A list of file formats supported by external plugins

Package name	Supported file formats	Dependencies
pyexcel-io	csv, csvz [1], tsv, tsvz [2]	csvz,tsvz readers depends on chardet
pyexcel-xls	xls, xlsx(read only), xlsm(read only)	xlrd, xlwt
pyexcel-xlsx	xlsx	openpyxl
pyexcel-ods3	ods	pyexcel-ezodf, lxml
pyexcel-ods	ods	odfpy

Dedicated file reader and writers

Package name	Supported file formats	Dependencies
pyexcel-xlsxw	xlsx(write only)	XlsxWriter
pyexcel-libxlsxw	xlsx(write only)	libxlsxwriter
pyexcel-xlsxr	xlsx(read only)	lxml
pyexcel-xlsbr	xlsb(read only)	pyxlsb
pyexcel-odsr	read only for ods, fods	lxml
pyexcel-odsw	write only for ods	loxun
pyexcel-htmlr	html(read only)	lxml,html5lib
pyexcel-pdfr	pdf(read only)	camelot

Plugin shopping guide

Since 2020, all pyexcel-io plugins have dropped the support for python versions which are lower than 3.6. If you want to use any of those Python versions, please use pyexcel-io and its plugins versions that are lower than 0.6.0.

Except csv files, xls, xlsx and ods files are a zip of a folder containing a lot of xml files

The dedicated readers for excel files can stream read

In order to manage the list of plugins installed, you need to use pip to add or remove a plugin. When you use virtualenv, you can have different plugins per virtual environment. In the situation where you have multiple plugins that does the same thing in your environment, you need to tell pyexcel which plugin to use per function call. For example, pyexcel-ods and pyexcel-odsr, and you want to get_array to use pyexcel-odsr. You need to append get_array(…, library=’pyexcel-odsr’).

Other data renderers

Package name	Supported file formats	Dependencies	Python versions
pyexcel-text	write only:rst, mediawiki, html, latex, grid, pipe, orgtbl, plain simple read only: ndjson r/w: json	tabulate	2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 3.5, 3.6, pypy
pyexcel-handsontable	handsontable in html	handsontable	same as above
pyexcel-pygal	svg chart	pygal	2.7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 3.6, pypy
pyexcel-sortable	sortable table in html	csvtotable	same as above
pyexcel-gantt	gantt chart in html	frappe-gantt	except pypy, same as above

Footnotes

[1]

zipped csv file

[2]

zipped tsv file

This library makes information processing involving various excel files as easy as processing array, dictionary when processing file upload/download, data import into and export from SQL databases, information analysis and persistence. It uses pyexcel and its plugins:

1. to provide one uniform programming interface to handle csv, tsv, xls, xlsx, xlsm and ods formats.

2. to provide one-stop utility to import the data in uploaded file into a database and to export tables in a database as excel files for file download.

3. to provide the same interface for information persistence at server side: saving a uploaded excel file to and loading a saved excel file from file system.

Tested Django Versions

Installation

You can install django-excel via pip:

$ pip install django-excel

or clone it and install it:

$ git clone https://github.com/pyexcel-webwares/django-excel.git
$ cd django-excel
$ python setup.py install

Setup

You will need to update your settings.py:

FILE_UPLOAD_HANDLERS = ("django_excel.ExcelMemoryFileUploadHandler",
                        "django_excel.TemporaryExcelFileUploadHandler")

Usage

Here is the example viewing function codes:

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.http import HttpResponseBadRequest
from django import forms
from django.template import RequestContext
import django_excel as excel

class UploadFileForm(forms.Form):
    file = forms.FileField()

def upload(request):
    if request.method == "POST":
        form = UploadFileForm(request.POST, request.FILES)
        if form.is_valid():
            filehandle = request.FILES['file']
            return excel.make_response(filehandle.get_sheet(), "csv")
        else:
            return HttpResponseBadRequest()
    else:
        form = UploadFileForm()
    return render_to_response('upload_form.html',
                              {'form': form},
                              context_instance=RequestContext(request))

def download(request):
    sheet = excel.pe.Sheet([[1, 2],[3, 4]])
    return excel.make_response(sheet, "csv")

Development guide

Development steps for code changes

1. git clone https://github.com/pyexcel/django-excel.git

2. cd django-excel

Upgrade your setup tools and pip. They are needed for development and testing only:

1. pip install –upgrade setuptools pip

Then install relevant development requirements:

1. pip install -r rnd_requirements.txt # if such a file exists

2. pip install -r requirements.txt

3. pip install -r tests/requirements.txt

Once you have finished your changes, please provide test case(s), relevant documentation and update changelog.yml

Note

As to rnd_requirements.txt, usually, it is created when a dependent library is not released. Once the dependency is installed (will be released), the future version of the dependency in the requirements.txt will be valid.

How to test your contribution

Although nose and doctest are both used in code testing, it is advisable that unit tests are put in tests. doctest is incorporated only to make sure the code examples in documentation remain valid across different development releases.

On Linux/Unix systems, please launch your tests like this:

$ make

On Windows, please issue this command:

> test.bat

Before you commit

Please run:

$ make format

so as to beautify your code otherwise your build may fail your unit test.

License

New BSD License

5 contributors

In alphabetical order:

• Andrei Lozhkin

• Minh-Long Do

• oon arfiandwi

• Utpal Brahma

• 김상엽

Change log

0.0.13 - 31.10.2025

Change:

1. Replace pkg_resources-based Django version check with django.get_version()

2. Exclude .venv from flake8 check to simplify development

0.0.12 - not released

Change:

1. Support for django 2.0.x

2. Tested against django 4.1

3. Change xlrd version <=1.2.0

0.0.11 - not released

Updated

1. Test Support for django 3.x.x

2. Tested against django 3.x.x

0.0.10 - 11.01.2018

Added

1. pyexcel-io#46, expose bulk_save to django developers

0.0.9 - 12.07.2017

Added

1. bring isave_to_database and isave_book_to_database

0.0.8 - 07.07.2017

Added

1. pyexcel#39, explicitly seeking at 0

0.0.7 - 29.06.2017

Added

1. pyexcel#38, Support unicode code as download file name

0.0.6 - 12.22.2016

Updated

1. pyexcel#26, raise ioerror if content is empty.

2. Use pyexcel-webio v0.0.9 so as to push out new version of pyexcel and its plugins.

0.0.5 - 26.08.2016

Added:

1. Support for django 1.6.x

2. Tested against django 1.10