Feature request: use verbose_name instead of field name for column names

When your exporting data from your database as xls or csv it’s usually for human reading so it would be nice if the column names would be the verbose_name of the model fields. i.e. “Company name” instead of company_name for a field: company_name = models.CharField(_('Company name'))

As far as i can tell this is not currently possible, even just passing a display_name value to a (custom) field for a resource would be a nice fix…

[DurandA]

@gnuhpc here is an updated solution working with Django>=1.9:

def get_export_headers(self):
    headers = []
    for field in self.get_fields():
        model_fields = self.Meta.model._meta.get_fields()
        header = next((x.verbose_name for x in model_fields if x.name == field.column_name), field.column_name)
        headers.append(header)
    return headers

[waketzheng]

If your resource class have custom field, code can be as follows:

from import_export import resources
from import_export.fields import Field

class VerboseExportMixin:
    """Export with verbose name"""

    def get_export_headers(self):
        vnames = {i.name: i.verbose_name for i in self.Meta.model._meta.fields}
        return [vnames.get(i.split("__")[0], i) for i in super().get_export_headers()]


class MyModelResource(VerboseExportMixin, resources.Resource):
    url = Field(column_name="Activation URL")
   
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel