Saturday 25 July 2009

Inlines support for Django generic views

Django's excellent Generic Views provide developers with most of what they need to get a site up and running (if they aren't using the Admin of course). The flexibility of these views is such that for most sites you don't need much else. Extending these views is also well documented and probably covers off 95% of the situations where the plain generic views fall short.

In a recent project I found another area where the generic views fall short: inline formsets.

I have added the ability to use inline formsets in generic views. The new view functions are drop in replacements for Django's with the addition of a new inlines argument.

Installation

From Source

Download wadofstuff-django-views.

To install it, run the following command inside the unpacked source directory:

python setup.py install

From pypi

If you have the Python easy_install utility available, you can
also type the following to download and install in one step:

easy_install wadofstuff-django-views

Or if you're using pip:

pip install wadofstuff-django-views

Or if you'd prefer you can simply place the included wadofstuff
directory somewhere on your Python path, or symlink to it from
somewhere on your Python path; this is useful if you're working from a
Subversion checkout.

Note that this application requires Python 2.4 or later. You can obtain
Python from http://www.python.org/.

Usage

wadofstuff.django.views.create_object(..., inlines=None)
wadofstuff.django.views.update_object(..., inlines=None)

These functions are identical to the Django ones except for the addition of the
inlines argument. This argument consists of a list of dictionaries that will
be passed as arguments after the parent_model argument to
inlineformset_factory(parent_model, ...).

For example, arguments to a generic view might typically look like:
crud_dict = {
'model':Author
'inlines':[{
'model':Book,
'extra':2,
'form':BookForm,
},{
'model':Article,
}],
# ... other generic view arguments
}
would translate to calls to inlineformset_factory() like:

inlineformset_factory(Author, model=Book, extra=2, form=BookForm)

and

inlineformset_factory(Author, model=Article)

The view function will create a formset for each inline model and add them to the template context. In the example above the context variables would be named book_formset and article_formset.

Update: A quick change to allow the views to be imported from wadofstuff.django.views. Bumped version to 1.0.1.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, this is great. I really needed an implementation like this and it's perfect. The only thing I'd recommend updating would be to store the formsets in a dictionary/list so that you can write a single template that will iterate over any of these formsets and create the markup. It'd be a little more "generic".

Thanks for the code!

kRON said...

This is *ACE* stuff!!!

Marcos Alcazar said...

It's just AMAZING! thanks a lot!