Reference

WorkbookView

class django_spreadsheet.WorkbookView

Base class for a Django view whose response is an xlsx workbook. You need to specify filename and worksheets.

filename

The filename of the workbook. This will be specified in the Content-disposition header of the response, so it will be the filename that the browser will use to save the workbook as.

worksheets

A list of Worksheet classes. The returned workbook will contain these worksheets.

Worksheet

class django_spreadsheet.Worksheet

Base class for worksheets.

Do not attempt to instantiate Worksheet objects directly. They are only meant to be instantiated automatically by WorkbookView, which will also set self.request to the Django request object. This can come in handy in get_queryset().

model

Mandatory. The model that will be queried to populate the worksheet.

name

Mandatory unless get_name() is overridden. The name of the worksheet—it will be used in the worksheet tab.

classmethod get_name()

Returns the name of the worksheet, which will be used in the worksheet tab. The default merely returns name. Override if you need a more complicated workflow, such as a localized name.

get_queryset()

Optional. The default returns self.model.objects.all(). Override it if you need a different queryset.

columns

Mandatory unless get_columns() is overridden. It is a list of dictionaries that specify the columns of the worksheet. Each dictionary has the following items:

heading

The column heading, a string.

value

A string or function describing the value the cell will have for each row.

If it is a string, then it is interpreted as a dotted path. For example, if value is “author.name”, then for each item obj of the queryset the cell value will be obj.author.name.

If it is a one-argument function, it receives the queryset item and returns the cell value. Thus, "author.name" and lambda obj: obj.author.name will have the same result when used as the value. In this case, prefer the first format. Use a function only for the cases when a string cannot do what you want.

If the function is a two-argument function, it receives the Worksheet object as the first argument and the queryset item as the second argument, and returns the cell value. Thus you can specify Worksheet methods in columns, for example:

import django_spreadsheet

from myapp import models

class MyWorksheet(django_spreadsheet.Worksheet):
    model = models.Book
    name = "Books"

    def get_book_title(self, book):
        if self.request.user.is_authenticated:
            return self.book.title
        else:
            return "Redacted"

    columns = [
        {"heading": "Title", "value": get_book_title},
    ]

Do this only if you need to use self; otherwise use one of the other forms.

get_columns()

Returns a list of dictionaries with the format described in columns, specifying the columns of the worksheet. The default merely returns columns. Override if you need a more complicated workflow.

column_width_factor

Optional. A number specifying how large to make column widths.

django-spreadsheet attempts to “autofit” columns. However, in order to actually autofit columns, the spreadsheet would need to be rendered. django-spreadsheet (and the openpyxl library on which it is based) does not have rendering capabilities, therefore it cannot really autofit columns.

The best we can do is find the max character length for each column and multiply it with a number, namely column_width_factor. The default is 1.23, which has been found with experimentation to provide good results.

view

When a WorkbookView creates a Worksheet object, it creates this attribute that points to the view instance. One use case of this is if a workbook (i.e. a django_spreadsheet.WorkbookView) has many worksheets that both need the same queries. In that case, in order to avoid making the same queries multiple times, they can be stored in the view and accessed from the worksheets.

request

When a WorkbookView creates a Worksheet object, it creates this attribute that points to request object.