Return openpyxl workbook object as HttpResponse in django. Is it possible?

Question

I need to provide an excel formatted data from django\'s database to visitors.

The only way I can think of is with these steps:

1. Extract data from database.

Answer 1

You don't actually need to save the data anywhere on disk; openpyxl has a way to do this, although it's not very well documented. A long while back, I created something like this using xlwt, but I recently also built something similar in the Falcon framework, using openpyxl.

Putting these two together, your code would look something along the lines of:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from openpyxl import Workbook
from openpyxl.writer.excel import save_virtual_workbook


workbook = Workbook()
worksheet = workbook.active

# ... worksheet.append(...) all of your data ...

response = HttpResponse(content=save_virtual_workbook(workbook), mimetype='application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet')
response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=myexport.xlsx'
return response

If you are generating larger files, I would recommend looking into using StreamingHttpResponse, but I believe this will at least get you going.

This is just an off-the-cuff snippet based on a merge of the two project I worked on, so it may not be exactly correct. It should be pretty close though. The output in Falcon looked like:

response.content_type = 'application/octet-stream;'
response.set_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename=myexport.xlsx')
response.body = save_virtual_workbook(workbook)

UPDATE: This is now much easier, as I did a complete rewrite of my old django-excel-response library, using openpyxl! It can now be found here: https://github.com/tarkatronic/django-excel-response

You can install it with pip install django-excel-response, and start using it as an alternative to Django's HttpResponse! There is minimal documentation included, and improvements/suggestions are welcome. :)