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Export a publication

Anything you can read in OpenCatalogi you can export — one item, one catalogue, the whole instance. Three serialisation formats: JSON (round-trippable, the on-the-wire format), Excel (one sheet per schema, ideal for bulk edits), DCAT (W3C DCAT-AP for interop with European open-data portals).

Goal​

By the end you will have exported one item to JSON and one whole catalogue to Excel, and read the exported files locally.

Prerequisites​

  • A catalogue with at least one item (see Publish an item).
  • Spreadsheet software for the Excel round-trip — Excel, LibreOffice Calc, Google Sheets. JSON / DCAT work in any text editor.

Steps​

  1. Open an item's detail page. In the toolbar, click Actions → Export. The menu offers JSON, Excel, and DCAT. Pick JSON.

    Item Actions Export menu

  2. The browser downloads a <slug>.json file. Open it — every schema property is one JSON key, files are referenced by URL, relations are inline arrays of target IDs. The shape is the same as the OpenCatalogi REST API response, so anything that consumes the API consumes this file.

    Exported JSON opened

  3. Back in OpenCatalogi, go up one level to the catalogue and click Actions → Export → Excel. The export dialog asks which schemas to include and whether to include attached files (URLs only, not bytes). Pick all schemas, include file refs, click Export.

    Catalogue Excel export dialog

  4. The browser downloads an .xlsx file. Open it — one sheet per schema (one row per item, one column per property), one sheet for the catalogue metadata, one sheet for the file references.

    Excel export opened

  5. To round-trip the Excel: edit a few cells, save the file, and back in OpenCatalogi click Actions → Import, pick the file. The preview dialog shows row counts (created / updated / errors) before you commit. Click Run import to write the changes.

    Excel import preview

Verification​

The JSON file opens and contains every property you can see in the UI; the Excel file has one sheet per schema with one row per item; the import dry-run produces the same row count as the export; round-trip edits show up on the re-opened items with a fresh update entry in their Audit tab.

Common issues​

SymptomFix
Export downloads an empty .json / .xlsxThe item or catalogue is empty, or the export ran against an unreadable scope — check the catalogue's visibility.
Excel cells show dates as long numbersCell formatting issue in the spreadsheet — set the column type to Date in the spreadsheet app. OpenCatalogi writes ISO 8601 strings, the round-trip is type-safe.
Import preview shows "schema not found"The instance is missing one of the schemas the file references — switch Include definitions on when you exported, or import the schema first via OpenRegister.

Reference​