Django - cannot get loaddata to work

Question

I have been using a Django database for a while without any major issues. Today I needed to set default values for a few tables for the first time. I created a fixtures directory in the top-level Django directory. Then I created the files for the default values. However, I keep getting error messages and I'm not sure why.

First I tried to use .sql files. It is worth noting that these tables are very simple; they only have one value, "name". My SQL file looked like this:

INSERT INTO MyTable (name) VALUES ('Default');

I saved this as MyTable.sql. When I ran the command python manage.py loaddata fixtures/MyTable.sql, I got this error message:

CommandError: Problem installing fixture 'MyTable': sql is not a known serialization format.

(Note: I also tried without the fixtures/ part, for the above example and the next, and got identical results).

I asked my project lead and he said he doesn't think SQL files can be used for this. So, I tried JSON files. My MyTable.json looked like this: [ { "model": "mydatabase.MyTable", "pk": 1, "fields": { "name": "Default" } } ]

I'll be very upfront to admit I've never worked with JSON in this context before, only in web development, so I don't know if the issue may be something I'm doing wrong here. I tried to base it on the formatting I found here. When I ran this through the loaddata function again, I got this error message:

C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django-1.6.1-py2.7.egg\django\core\management\commands\loaddata.py:216: UserWarning: No fixture named 'fixtures/MyTable' found.

This is my first time doing this and I've had a bit of a hard time finding documentation to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Could anyone please offer advice? Thanks!

Answer 1

As for me, the matter is the suffix of the output file.

python manage.py dumpdata -o my_dump
python manage.py loaddata < my_dump # it fails
# change the file name my_dump to my_dump.json
python manage.py loaddata < my_dump.json  # it works

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So, I guess the dumpdata implicitly use json as output format. While loaddata needs a format tip from file name suffix.