The Content Import Flow

The Content Import Flow

The Wagtail Content Import app provides:

• Pickers - which select and import raw document data
• Parsers - which parse the raw document data into a standard intermediate form
• Mappers - which convert this intermediate form into a final output (typically a Wagtail StreamField)

The typical flow is as follows, for a Page model with ContentImportMixin:

1. The Create view in the Wagtail Admin provides a button, which calls a picker.

2. The picker enables a document to be selected, and makes a POST request to the Create view with the document data.

3. The Wagtail hook for "before_create_page" in the picker detects the document, and calls a relevant parser.

4. The parser's parse() method converts the raw document data to a list of {'type': type, 'value': value} elements.

5. The create_page_from_import function is called, which in turn passes the parsed data to the Page model's create_from_import method (inherited from ContentImportMixin).

6. By default, this creates an instance of the Page's mapper_class, then uses its map() method to call a relevant Converter for each {'type': type, 'value': value} element. This returns a StreamField-compatible list of ('block_name', block_content) tuples.

7. Finally a Page model instance is created (but not saved) with the document's title, and the content inserted into a field called body.

8. The Create view is then rendered with the Page model instance bound to the form.