I've inherited a Django PostGres application with a model containing around 40 tables.
I've redesigned the model from head to toe, and now I'm setting in to re-build the web front end. I haven't used Django previous to this project - and no HTML for many years - but I'm happy enough with the ORM end of Django.
As a raw default, I just wanted to display all the fields of a class on an individual html page. Any references (i.e. ForeignKeys, or ManyToOne references) should appear as html links to another html page, which displays that class' data.
The application that I've inherited does more or less that, but uses about 50 modules containing hundreds of boiler-plate views, forms, and serializers - absolutely none of which contain anything remotely intelligent in. The "active" code on each form just sayd 'all'.
Rather than autogenerate this code (yuk!), is there a quick way of asking Django to display a basic tabular view unless there is a bespoke view for the table?
Related
I am currently working to write a web app where people fill out the necessary information, and apply to their mentors.
So, at this point, mentors have a model class that is pretty much like the applicant's, so that they can correct the applicant's info without affecting the applicant's original profile.
I will appreciate any helpful comments. Specifically, I am looking for:
-A similar per-exisiting django app that does more or less so I can browse the source.
-Any special Django feature that allows this that I can not aware of.
-General info on how things like these are done in general.
Thank you.
Ad general info)
You would benefit from doing this in a single model (say ApplicationModel), with fields in pairs - field_name_applicant, field_name_mentor.
Then use a CreateView with its fields property set to only the *_applicant fields for the applicant to fill in the applications initially, and an UpdateView with its fields set to the *_mentor fields for the mentor to correct the applicant fields.
Have ApplicationModel.clean() copy all *_applicant field values to their *_mentor counterpart if the later is not set.
Now you have all your business logic in the model where it belongs; quoting a headline in the introduction of Two Scoops of Django:
Fat Models, Helper Modules, Thin Views, Stupid Templates
I am a django noob and am trying to figure out how to get the admin module to do something slightly different than the normal operation on a single model. Essentially what I need is to run a query and display the results of the query as a view page and then allow the link to the edit page take the user to an existing model's edit view. 2 of the 3 tables in my query are related, but not all 3.
Example:
select a.foo, a.second_field, b.bar, c.unrelated_field
from a, b, c
where a.primary_key = b.foreign_key
and a.some_value = c.some_value
Note that a and c are not defined as related tables.
I would like to have a view of this query output and have a link to the edit view of the b model as a whole when selected.
I have created a view in the DB for this query and simply created a new model which makes it easy to get the view, but I'm not sure this is even the right approach to start with...but from there I can't seem to figure out how to make this link to the edit page for the B table.
Any pointers or advice on how best to accomplish something like this with django admin would be appreciated!
Using Django 1.3.1 by the way.
Cheers!
You can override change_view in your ModelAdmin so it will construct a list of dicts with all your needed data. Then override change_list.html template to display this data correctly and link it with change_form view for correct model. So it will flawlessly integrate in Django's admin site.
And I don't like DB views as long as it's possible to solve the problem without it. If data can be constructed in Python without massive performance gaps and lots of magic code, it should be processed in Python.
I'm building a small site framework for a set of sites that are likely to have quite a few unstructured pages - meaning they have:
Slightly different layouts per page
Lots of one-off text
None/very little generated content from models
I would like to allow clients to edit the content of these pages through my admin UI (I'm using Django for this project), but with the requirement that they are not exposed to the page HTML and are only able to edit parts of the page that I've specified as fields; for example:
Titles
A few blocks of text content
Perhaps some blocks of predefined image locations
PDF files that need embedding
Where these fields vary significantly between pages.
The layout, and what fields these pages require would be specified by the developer, so there's no need to dynamically generate much for this.
The 'best' idea I've had so far is to serialise these blocks of content once they've been edited by the user and store them in a 'Pages' table/model in my relational database, or just throw MongoDB or similar at it.
Conceptually, how would you implement such pages? As mentioned, I'm using Django so any implementation suggestions specific to Django are welcome, but general high-level ideas would be great too.
I would implement a ContentBlock model, which has .kind (header, text, image, pdf) and a .data, which would house the content (if text) or path to an uploaded pdf/image/etc. Presumably then you'd hardcode the pages with the appropriate blocks defined - I'd just use hardcoded slugs, eg, 'home-title', 'home-intro', 'about-title', 'about-text', 'about-right-photo', etc.
I would suggest not using Django's admin interface. It's much more suited to editing homogenous, non-business-logic models. I'd just add an edit view that renders the appropriate form fields for the blocks instead - html editor, file upload, etc. It's possible to do that in the django admin, but in my experience it's not worth the trouble - plus, if you do your own edit view, you can have it use the same base templates as the rest of the site, which IMO is a better user experience.
Here are a couple of apps which do that for you:
django-generic-flatblocks
django-boxes
Along with django-frontendadmin, it's super cool.
Django is making very nice forms after creating a models.py and an admin.py.
How can I reuse these forms (with the extra nice handling of foreign keys and many-to-many fields) in my own views?
ModelForm does only generate "simple" forms. Where do I get the extra batteries?
I was actually able to replicate those green buttons in my forms by following the instructions on this page: http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/hacks/replicating-djangos-admin/
A stock ModelForm will do almost all of what the admin does (ForeignKeys will turn into a dropdown select, ManyToManyFields will turn into a multiple-select).
The main exception would be the little green plus buttons for adding a new entry. It would be pretty hard to make those generic, as they depend on a number of admin-specific things: knowing where to find an add page for the linked model; JS to popup a window, close it on submit, and update the parent page; etc. You can dig into the admin and figure out how it implements those extra niceties, but there is not going to be a simple way to drop them into your code.
The other nicety you might be wanting is the filter_horizontal or filter_vertical alternative UIs for a ManyToManyField. Those are implemented as ordinary form widgets, so the potential is there for reusing them in your own code, but I'm guessing it'll take some experimentation and customization to make it work properly.
Have 2 tables Domain and Group having one to many relationship.
These tables have many to many relationship with User table
On the User admin interface I am rendering the Group and Domain as CheckboxSelectMultiple
widgets.
Is it possible to present this in a table form with 2 columns: Domain in one column and the list of groups belonging to the domain in the other column.
I want to override the fieldset template of the admin. However I am having difficulties knowing which methods/properties I can use with an AdminField.
Thanks
I'm not quite sure I 100% follow what you are trying to display.
AdminField is not documented unfortunately but its a short class, only 18 lines long so you can read it here.
I have a feeling you might be trying to step beyond what the admin allows you to do easily, once you are trying to combine more than two different models on the same page things can get a bit messy and you are soon in the business of customizing the admin by writing custom views and templates.
Am I correct in thinking you want to change the list of the objects? Rather than changing the editing/creating page?
I had similar problem and what I did is that I created new html pages and copied the same code from the Admin Template directory HTML pages to my template directory which will be overridden automatically, and then changed the HTML code to what I wanted to be. hope this is useful.