Custom Admin Views

Django Admin Customization

Refer to this repo to see fully-implemented custom administrative interfaces:

https://github.com/SEI-ATL/django-song-site

Django generally creates a pretty good administrative interface. It automatically reads the fields off models and creates forms for you to edit your database on a professional-looking web-page.

Here's a look into how to customize Django Admin views. We're using techniques described in the Django docs here:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/intro/tutorial07/

The repoo we're working with has models for Artists, Albums and Songs. The models have one-to-many relationships set up between each other:

• each album refers to an artist

• each song refers to an album and an artist

If we go to the admin site the admin panel doesn't automatically show all the songs on an album when we view an album. We have to manually configure the admin panel to display this relationship.

Show All Songs On An Album

Here's a simple example of how to display all the songs associated with an album when you look at an album in an Admin interface. Basically, you have to define how a Song is displayed when it's displayed "inline" in another template. And, you have to tell the Album that it displays Songs in it's template.

Django comes with lots of ModelAdmin classes that define how models are shown in the Admin interface. By default a ModelAdmin class basically iterates through the fields on a model and creates inputs and forms that appear on a webpage to let users edit the values.

Django has a special sub-class of ModelAdmin called InlineModelAdmin. An InlineModelAdmin gives us the ability to edit models on the same page as a parent model. So, we can edit songs on their parent Album model.

There's two subclasses of InlineModelAdmin: TabularInline and StackedInline.

• ModelAdmin documentation
• [InlineModelAdmin documentation](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/ref/contrib/admin/#inlinemodeladmin-objects

TabularInline is more compact. TabularInline displays all of the properties of an inlined model in one row across columns. Songs for an album would be displayed something like this:

Album: Pinkerton
Songs:
El Scorcho     4:04
Why Bother?    2:08
The Good Life  4:17

StackedInline iterates through the properties of an inlined model and stacks them all on top of each other. Songs for an album would look something like this:

Album: Pinkerton
Songs:
El Scorcho
4:04

Why Bother?
2:08

The Good Life
4:17

Tie It All Together

Here's an example of how you create an Inline interface for a Song. You make a class called SongInline, have the class inherit TabularInline and set a property model = Song inside the class.

Then, Create a custom Admin interface for Album. Create a class called AlbumAdmin and have it extend admin.ModelAdmin. Create a variable inside the class called inlines and set it equal to an array containing all of it's inlined associations.

Finally, register the Album model with it's custom AlbumAdmin interface and register the Song model and allow it to get a default Admin interface.

Take a look!

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Artist, Album, Song

class SongInline(admin.TabularInline):
  model = Song

class AlbumAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
  inlines = [SongInline]

admin.site.register(Album, AlbumAdmin)
admin.site.register(Song)