django-dynamic-raw-id

A Django admin raw_id_fields widget replacement that handles display of an object's string value on change and can be overridden via a template.

See this example:

Compatibility Matrix:

Py/Dj	3.8	3.9	3.10	3.11	3.12
3.2 (LTS)	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
4.0	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
4.1	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
4.2 (LTS)	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
5.0	—	—	✓	✓	✓
5.1	—	—	✓	✓	✓

Rationale

By default, Django’s admin loads all possible related instances into a select-box interface (<select>) for fields that are ForeignKey. This can result in long load times and unresponsive admin pages for models with thousands of instances, or with multiple ForeinKeys.

The normal fix is to use Django's ModelAdmin.raw_id_fields, but by default it only shows the raw id of the related model instance, which is somewhat unhelpful.

This package improves the user experience by providing the string representation or other customized text for the related instance, linked to that instance's admin change form, in addition to the raw id itself.

Installation

Install the package with `pip``:

$ pip install django-dynamic-raw-id

Put dynamic_raw_id to your list of INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
  # ... other apps
  'dynamic_raw_id',
)

And add the urlpattern. Make sure its listed before the generic admin.site.urls urlpattern include:

urlpatterns = [
  # ...
  path('admin/dynamic_raw_id/', include('dynamic_raw_id.urls')),
  path("admin/", admin.site.urls),
]

dynamic_raw_id comes with some static files so don't forget to run manage.py collectstatic.

Usage

To start using django-dynamic-raw-id in your application all you need to do is implement DynamicRawIDMixin in your ModelAdmin class and add the desired fields to a list of `dynamic_raw_id_fields``:

from dynamic_raw_id.admin import DynamicRawIDMixin

class UserProfileAdmin(DynamicRawIDMixin, admin.ModelAdmin):
  dynamic_raw_id_fields = ('user',)

You can use dynamic_raw_id widgets in a Admin filter as well:

from dynamic_raw_id.admin import DynamicRawIDMixin
from dynamic_raw_id.filters import DynamicRawIDFilter


class UserProfileAdmin(DynamicRawIDMixin, admin.ModelAdmin):
  list_filter = (
    ('dynamic_raw_id_fk', DynamicRawIDFilter),
  )

Customizing the value of the dynamic widget

The coolest feature of django-dynamic-raw-id is the ability to customize the output of the value displayed alongside the DynamicRawIDWidget. There is a basic implementation if all you want is your object's __unicode__ value. To change the value displayed all you need to do is implement the correct template.

django-dynamic-raw-id looks for this template structure dynamic_raw_id/<app>/<model>.html and dynamic_raw_id/<app>/multi_<model>.html (for multi-value lookups).

For instance, if I have a blog post with a User dynamic_raw_id field that I want display as Firstname Lastname, I would create the template dynamic_raw_id/auth/user.html with:

<span>{{ object.0.first_name }} {{ object.0.last_name }}</span>

A custom admin URL prefix

If you have your admin and the dynamic_raw_id scripts located on a different prefix than /admin/dynamic_raw_id/ you need adjust the DYNAMIC_RAW_ID_MOUNT_URL Javascript variable.

Example:

# In case the app is setup at /foobar/dynamic_raw_id/
path('foobar/dynamic_raw_id/', include('dynamic_raw_id.urls')),

<script>
  window.DYNAMIC_RAW_ID_MOUNT_URL = "{% url 'admin:index' %}";
</script>

An ideal place is the admin admin/base_site.html template. Full example:

{% extends "admin/base_site.html" %} {% block extrahead %} {{ block.super }}
<script>
  window.DYNAMIC_RAW_ID_MOUNT_URL = "{% url 'admin:index' %}";
</script>
{% endblock %}

Testing and Local Development

The testsuite uses Selenium to do frontend tests, we require Firefox and geckodriver to be installed. You can install geckodriver on OS X with Homebrew:

$ brew install geckodriver

Run the testsuite in your local environment using:

# If you don't have Poetry yet, install it globally.
$ pip install poetry

# Install Dependencies once and run pytest
$ poetry install
$ poetry run pytest

Or use tox to test against various Django and Python versions:

# If you don't have Tox yet, install it globally.
$ pip install tox

# Run tox against multiple Python versions.
$ tox

You can open a Poetry shell to invoke the test suite or other 'manage.py' commands by calling the django-admin tool with the test app settings.

This also allows you to run the internal testing app in a testserver, to preview a sample of what django-dynamic-raw-id is doing:

$ poetry shell

$ django-admin migrate
$ django-admin createsuperuser
$ django-admin runserver