django-subadmin
provides a special kind of ModelAdmin
, called SubAdmin
, that allows it to be nested within another ModelAdmin
instance. Similar to django's built-in InlineModelAdmin
, it allows editing of related objects, but instead of doing it inline, it gives you a full ModelAdmin
as sub-admin of parent ModelAdmin
. Like InlineModelAdmin
it works on models related by ForeignKey
. Multiple SubAdmin
instances can be nested within a single ModelAdmin
or SubAdmin
allowing for multi-level nesting.
The easiest and recommended way to install django-subadmin
is from PyPI
pip install django-subadmin
You need to add subadmin
to INSTALLED_APPS
in your projects settings.py
, otherwise django
will not be able to find the necessary templates and template tags.
# settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
'subadmin',
...
)
Sometimes things are best explained by an example. Let's say you have two related models.
# models.py
class MailingList(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
class Subscriber(models.Model):
mailing_list = models.ForeignKey(MailingList)
username = models.CharField(max_length=100)
If you wish to display only subscribers belonging to a particular mailing list in django admin, your only options is to use InlineModelAdmin
, which is not very practical when dealing with large number of related objects, plus, you loose all the cool functionality of ModelAdmin
like searching, filtering, pagination, etc ...
This is where SubAdmin
comes in.
# admin.py
from subadmin import SubAdmin, RootSubAdmin
from .models import MailingList, Subscriber
# Instead of admin.ModelAdmin we subclass SubAdmin,
# we also set model attribute
class SubscriberSubAdmin(SubAdmin):
model = Subscriber
list_display = ('username',)
# Since this is the top level model admin, which will be registred with admin.site,
# we subclass RootSubAdmin and set subadmins attribute
class MailingListAdmin(RootSubAdmin):
list_display = ('name',)
subadmins = [SubscriberSubAdmin]
admin.site.register(MailingList, MailingListAdmin)
With just a few lines of code you get a fully functional ModelAdmin
, that will automatically pull in just the relevant related objects, based on ForeignKey
relation between the two models, it will also auto set ForeignKey
fields for nested relations and exclude them from change form when adding and editing objects on subadmin.
SubAdmin
instances are accesible from edit view of the ModelAdmin
instance they are nested in. In the screenshot above you can see links to Subscribers and Messages subadmins (marked with red rectangle) for MailingList
instance Mailing list 5.
SubAdmin
looks and behaves just like a regular ModelAdmin
, but looking at breadcrumbs (marked with red rectangle), you can see it is nested within another ModelAdmin
. Displayed Subscribers
are limited to those related to MailingList
instance Mailing list 5.
When adding or editing objects with SubAdmin
, ForeignKey
fields to parent instances are removed from the form and automatically set when saving. In this example mailing_list
field is removed and value is set to parent MailingList
instance Mailing list 5.
If you want to see it in action, or get a more in-depth look at how to set everything up, check out https://github.com/inueni/django-subadmin-example.
Current release of django-subadmin
is 1.9.0 and is compatible with Django 1.9, 1.10 and 1.11.
Since Django versions before 1.11 don't support get_exclude
on ModelAdmin
instances, a workaround that temporarily stores excluded fields on ModelAdmin
instance, is used. This should not cause any issues under normal circumstances.
django-subadmin
version numbers are related to Django version numbers. django-subadmin
major and minor version numbers equal the minimal compatible django release.
django-subadmin
has evolved from code that has been running on production servers since early 2014 without any issues. Still, the code has been heavily refactored prior to public release, and while it is unlikely to eat your data, consider it BETA software.