How to use date widget in django-import-export?

Question

I'm new to programming so please bear with me in case I ask silly questions. I'm working on my first project which will gather data from Excel file. I'm trying django-import-export for that purpose but ran into a problem with date containing field. As far as I could understand searching this issue I need to use Date widget, cause it basically reads it as string while importing. But I couldn't find any example where this widget is used so I can see it's syntax. The model I'm working on is shown below. Hope some of you can help me on this. Thanks.

from django.db import models
from import_export.admin import ImportExportModelAdmin
from import_export import widgets

class Employee(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    badge = models.CharField(max_length=15)
    start_date = models.DateField(auto_now=False, auto_now_add=False, blank=False, null=True,widget=widgets.DateWidget(format=None))
    end_date = models.DateField(auto_now=False, auto_now_add=False, blank=True, null=True)
    status = models.BooleanField(choices=(
        (True, 'Active'), 
        (False, 'Inactive')
        ), default=True)
    job = models.ForeignKey(Matrix, on_delete=models.CASCADE, blank=True, null=True)
    location = models.ForeignKey(Location, on_delete=models.CASCADE, blank=True, null=True)

    def __str__(self):
        return str(self.badge)+ str(" - ") + str(self.name)
    class Meta:
        ordering=('name', 'badge', 'start_date', 'status',)
        verbose_name='Employee'
        verbose_name_plural='Employees'

Answer 1

First, you have to create a Resource:

from import_export import resources
from import_export.fields import Field

class EmployeeResource(resources.ModelResource):
    start_date = Field(attribute='start_date', column_name='<column_name>', widget=DateWidget('<date_format>')) 
    ...
    class Meta:
        model = Employee
        fields = ('start_date',...)

Where <column_name> is the name of the column and <date_format> is the format of the incoming date, for example: '%d/%m/%Y'

Then, in your admin.py, you have to link the modeladmin to the resource

class EmployeeAdmin(ImportExportMixin, admin.ModelAdmin):
    resource_class = EmployeeResource