Question

I’m working on an online form builder tool (specifically for insurance agents). One of the things we would like to offer our customers is to have pre-built forms for common products (auto, home, life, etc) be available by default, but still modifiable.

Under normal circumstances, I would simply create the forms in my development environment, then create a fixture containing these forms, and run syncdb on all the live sites. Unfortunately that isn’t a possibility, as some of our customers already have created forms, which may conflict with the primary keys in my fixture. There are also four different inter-related tables that I am looking to export, but it is all in my sqformbuilder app.

Is there a way to export a fixture but allow it to be flexibly inserted into another running copy of the database?

Answer 1

With some help from sebpiq, I was able to get this fixed using South, natural keys, and json dumpdata.

Basically it is just a data migration using the dumped json:

datafdir = os.path.dirname(__file__)
dataf = open(os.path.join(datafdir, '0002_mh_quote_form.data.json'), 'r')
builtformfieldsjson = simplejson.loads(dataf.read())
form = BuiltForm.objects.get(pk=1)
for field in builtformfieldsjson:
    try:
        builtfield = BuiltFormField.objects.get_by_natural_key(form, field['fields']['fieldname'])
    except:
        builtfield = BuiltFormField(fieldname=field['fields']['fieldname'], builtform=form)
    for part in field['fields']:            
        if part == 'builtform':
            continue
        setattr(builtfield, part, field['fields'][part])
    builtfield.save()