Writing an exporter plugin

An Exporter is a method to export the product and order data in pretix for later use in another program.

In this document, we will walk through the creation of an exporter output plugin step by step.

Please read Creating a plugin first, if you haven’t already.

Exporter registration

The exporter API does not make a lot of usage from signals, however, it does use a signal to get a list of all available exporters. Your plugin should listen for this signal and return the subclass of pretix.base.exporter.BaseExporter that we’ll provide in this plugin:

1from django.dispatch import receiver
2
3from pretix.base.signals import register_data_exporters
4
5
6@receiver(register_data_exporters, dispatch_uid="exporter_myexporter")
7def register_data_exporter(sender, **kwargs):
8    from .exporter import MyExporter
9    return MyExporter

Some exporters might also prove to be useful, when provided on an organizer-level. In order to declare your exporter as capable of providing exports spanning multiple events, your plugin should listen for this signal and return the subclass of pretix.base.exporter.BaseExporter that we’ll provide in this plugin:

1from django.dispatch import receiver
2
3from pretix.base.signals import register_multievent_data_exporters
4
5
6@receiver(register_multievent_data_exporters, dispatch_uid="multieventexporter_myexporter")
7def register_multievent_data_exporter(sender, **kwargs):
8    from .exporter import MyExporter
9    return MyExporter

If your exporter supports both event-level and multi-event level exports, you will need to listen for both signals.

The exporter class

class pretix.base.exporter.BaseExporter

The central object of each exporter is the subclass of BaseExporter.

BaseExporter.event

The default constructor sets this property to the event we are currently working for. This will be None if the exporter is run for multiple events.

BaseExporter.events

The default constructor sets this property to the list of events to work on, regardless of whether the exporter is called for one or multiple events.

BaseExporter.identifier

A short and unique identifier for this exporter. This should only contain lowercase letters and in most cases will be the same as your package name.

This is an abstract attribute, you must override this!

BaseExporter.verbose_name

A human-readable name for this exporter. This should be short but self-explaining. Good examples include ‘Orders as JSON’ or ‘Orders as Microsoft Excel’.

This is an abstract attribute, you must override this!

BaseExporter.description

A description for this exporter.

BaseExporter.category

A category name for this exporter, or None.

BaseExporter.export_form_fields

When the event’s administrator visits the export page, this method is called to return the configuration fields available.

It should therefore return a dictionary where the keys should be field names and the values should be corresponding Django form fields.

We suggest that you return an OrderedDict object instead of a dictionary. Your implementation could look like this:

 1@property
 2def export_form_fields(self):
 3    return OrderedDict(
 4        [
 5            ('tab_width',
 6             forms.IntegerField(
 7                 label=_('Tab width'),
 8                 default=4
 9             ))
10        ]
11    )
BaseExporter.render(form_data: dict) → Tuple[str, str, bytes | None]

Render the exported file and return a tuple consisting of a filename, a file type and file content.

Parameters:

  • form_data (dict) – The form data of the export details form

  • output_file – You can optionally accept a parameter that will be given a file handle to write the output to. In this case, you can return None instead of the file content.

Note: If you use a ModelChoiceField (or a ModelMultipleChoiceField), the form_data will not contain the model instance but only it’s primary key (or a list of primary keys) for reasons of internal serialization when using background tasks.

This is an abstract method, you must override this!