Django: how to create PDF, MS Word and Excel documents fromtemplates

If you’re building a Django system that implies serving some kind of documents like reports or bills, chances are you want to provide docs in various formats from PDF to MS Word to HTML . But how to implement this without resorting to numerous templates and packages for each documenttype?

To tackle this issue I wrote templated_docs - a Django package that allows you to generate documents in multiple formats from just one template. And what’s even better is that you can use a regular Django templating language inside thosedocs!

In this post I’ll give you a gist of what you can do with thismodule.

Installation 1. InstallLibreOffice

Templated-docs uses LibreOffice for conversion under the hood, so make sure you have a recent version installed (5.x versions will do fine). There is no need of having LibreOffice running all the time, in fact, you don’t even need a graphical subsystem to be installed on your server. We’ll use the suite as a library via the LibreOfficeKit API . Note the path Libreoffice has been installed to, we might need itlater.

2. Install templated-docs

Installation is as simple as pip install templated-docs . Don’t forget to add templated_docs to your INSTALLED_APPS Django settings. Then specify the path to LibreOffice’s program directory in yoursettings:

TEMPLATED_DOCS_LIBREOFFICE_PATH = '/usr/share/libreoffice/program' 3. There is no step 3, we’re allset! Usageexample

Let’s put together a dead-simple system for issuing invoices. What we have here is a Customer model, and an InvoiceForm form to fill in some requiredfields.

# models.py from django.db import models class Customer(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=200) address = models.TextField() def __str__(self): return self.name # forms.py from django import forms from invoices.models import Customer class InvoiceForm(forms.Form): FORMAT_CHOICES = ( ('pdf', 'PDF'), ('docx', 'MS Word'), ('html', 'HTML'), ) number = forms.CharField(label='Invoice #') customer = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=Customer.objects.all()) subject = forms.CharField() amount = forms.DecimalField() format = forms.ChoiceField(choices=FORMAT_CHOICES) # views.py from django.shortcuts import render from templated_docs import fill_template from templated_docs.http import FileResponse from invoices.forms import InvoiceForm def invoice_view(request): form = InvoiceForm(request.POST or None) if form.is_valid(): doctype = form.cleaned_data['format'] filename = fill_template( 'invoices/invoice.odt', form.cleaned_data, output_format=doctype) visible_filename = 'invoice.{}'.format(doctype) return FileResponse(filename, visible_filename) else: return render(request, 'invoices/form.html', {'form': form})

Next, create the actual invoice template and save it as invoices/invoice.odt in your Django templates’ folder. It could look likethis:

And that’s it! Fill out the form, choose the format you need, and instantly get a templated and converted document (the one in the picture is PDF ):

All the sample code, including the template, is available for playing in the example/ folder of the project’srepository.

Templated_docs offers more than a simple document generation. For example, you can embed images in documents and easily create Django management command that generate docs. Consult the documentation for moreinformation.

Have you found an interesting applicaton for this package? Share incomments!