Exporting data into a data fixture

A data fixture is considered a collection of files that contain data objects related to the models in your application. This really refers to a directory of files that Django searches in for data; by default, that is the fixtures folder found in every Django app. This directory can also be changed by modifying the settings.py variable called FIXTURE_DIRS, but this is not necessary if you intend to use the default directory and behavior. Django fixture files can be written in JSON, JSONL, XML, or YAML file formats. This means you can easily export data from other systems if that data is exported into one of these formats, even if that other system is not a Django project. Keep in mind that the table structure of the objects must match exactly if you wish to do a clean export from an old system and import into a new system.

Usually, there is a great deal of data parsing involved when exporting from an older legacy system and importing into the newly...