Question

Hi I am writing a Django view which generates a csv file. Pretty straightforward. In my view I have:

def mysearch(request, exportCSV):
    ...
    if 'q' in request.GET or exportCSV:
        results_list = request.session['results_list']
    ...
    if exportCSV:
        response = HttpResponse(mimetype='text/csv')
        response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=myfile.csv'
        writer = csv.writer(response)

        # write field titles                
        writer.writerow(['name_of_firstfield', 'name_of_secondfield', ... ,])

        for row in results_list: 
            # write row content
            writer.writerow([row.firstfield, row.secondfield, ... , ])
        return response     

There are actually two questions here:

1. How do I output the name of a model field as text so I can write the field titles to the first row.

2. How can I avoid specifying each field (considering I have a lot of fields) for both lines. I basically want to say for each row, output each field name then output each piece of data.

Can I somehow use getattr here?.

Answer 1

Have a look at this snippet as a example, you can access a models field names via model._meta.fields and you can use getattr() to get the value of a field for a given object. e.g.

fields = ct_object._meta.fields

writer = csv.writer(response)
writer.writerow([field.column for field in fields])

for object in objects_to_export:
    writer.writerow([getattr(object, field.name) for field in fields])