How do I “pickle” instances of Django models in a database into sample python code I can use to load sample data?

Question

How do I \"pickle\" instances of Django models in a database into sample python code I can use to load sample data?

I want to:
1) Take a snapshot of several hundred

Answer 1

An easy way to do that would be to convert the model to a dict. Then, you can trivially pickle that and then re-inflate it to create new model instances.

To store the model as a dict, you can use a built-in Django function:

from django.forms.models import model_to_dict
my_dict = model_to_dict(my_instance,fields=[],exclude=[])

Once you've converted the instance to a dict and redacted what's necessary, just use the normal pickle.dumps and pickle.loads methods to store and retrieve the data. To create a new model instance using that dict, you can do something like:

my_instance = MyModel(**my_dict)
#add any customization for the new instance here
my_instance.save()

Answer 2

On Django version 1.8 and above, if your models has foreign keys, you can use:

my_dict = dict([(f.attname, getattr(instance, f.attname))
               for f in instance._meta.get_fields()
               if hasattr(f, 'attname')])