Add simple interactions to the otherwise static django admin.

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• Creator & Maintainer: Ambient Digital

django-dynamic-admin-forms

Add simple interactions to the otherwise static django admin.

Installation

• Install the package via pip:

  pip install django-dynamic-admin-forms

  or via pipenv:

  pipenv install django-dynamic-admin-forms

• Add the module to INSTALLED_APPS:

  INSTALLED_APPS = (
      "django_dynamic_admin_forms",
      "django.contrib.admin",
  )

  Ensure that the dynamic_admin_forms comes before the default django.contrib.admin in the list of installed apps, because otherwise the templates, which are overwritten by dynamic_admin_forms won't be found.

• Ensure that the dynamic_admin_forms templates are found via using APP_DIRS setting:

  TEMPLATES = [
      {
          "BACKEND": "django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates",
          "APP_DIRS": True,
      },
  ]

• Run python manage.py collectstatic to include this apps Javascript code in your settings.STATIC_ROOT directory

Usage

• Add the django_dynamic_admin_forms.DynamicModelAdminMixin to your admin classes

• Add the django_dynamic_admin_forms.urls to your urls

  from django.contrib import admin
  from django.urls import path, include
  
  urlpatterns = [
      path("admin/", admin.site.urls),
      path("dynamic-admin-form/", include("django_dynamic_admin_forms.urls")),
  ]

• In addition to the standard fields declaration, specify a list of dynamic_fields

• For each dynamic field, add a method get_dynamic_{field_name}_field to the admin

  • Input: data: Dict[str, Any] - the cleaned form data
  • Output:
    • queryset: Optional[Queryset] - The values to select from
    • value: Any - The value, the field should have (must be compatible to the field type)
    • hidden: Bool - True, if field should be hidden

• A rather non-sensical example:

  from django.contrib import admin
  
  from .models import MyModel
  from django_dynamic_admin_forms.admin import DynamicModelAdminMixin
  
  
  @admin.register(MyModel)
  class MyModelAdmin(DynamicModelAdminMixin, admin.ModelAdmin):
      fields = ("name", "city")
      dynamic_fields = ("city",)
  
      def get_dynamic_city_field(self, data):
          # automatically choose first city that matches first letter of name
          name = data.get("name")
          if not name:
              queryset = City.objects.all()
              value = data.get("city")
          else:
              queryset = City.objects.filter(name__startswith=name[0])
              value = queryset.first()
          hidden = not queryset.exists()
          return queryset, value, hidden

How it works

Whenever a dynamic form changes, an event handler makes a request to a special endpoint, which returns new HTML to swap into the existing form. This new HTML is directly generated by django.contrib.admin, so we only have to set the outerHTML of the correct HTML elements to update the form.

Limitations

• does not work in conjunction with inlines
• does not validate that the selected value is really part of the original queryset
  • if anybody can modify your DOM, they could potentially inject invalid values
  • you have to write Model.clean() methods to guard against that
• only tested with Django 3.2

Development

For local development, create a virtual environment in the testproj folder:

$ cd testproj
$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
$ cd ..
$ flit install --symlink

Now the package should be available in your virtual environment and any changes should be directly visible.

Alternatively, copy the directory dynamic_admin_forms into any normal django project, so that the python interpreter finds the local version instead of the installed (old) version.

Running E2E tests

To run end-to-end tests locally:

$ cd testproj
$ python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000 &  # start server
$ python manage.py loaddata fixtures/fixtures-dev.json
$ cd ../e2e
$ yarn install  # or npm install (only needed first time)
$ yarn cypress  # or npm run cypress

Installation

• Install the package via pip:

  pip install django-dynamic-admin-forms

  or via pipenv:

  pipenv install django-dynamic-admin-forms

• Add the module to INSTALLED_APPS:

  INSTALLED_APPS = (
      "django_dynamic_admin_forms",
      "django.contrib.admin",
  )

  Ensure that the dynamic_admin_forms comes before the default django.contrib.admin in the list of installed apps, because otherwise the templates, which are overwritten by dynamic_admin_forms won't be found.

• Ensure that the dynamic_admin_forms templates are found via using APP_DIRS setting:

  TEMPLATES = [
      {
          "BACKEND": "django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates",
          "APP_DIRS": True,
      },
  ]

• Run python manage.py collectstatic to include this apps Javascript code in your settings.STATIC_ROOT directory

Contribute

Setup package for development

• Create a Python virtualenv and activate it
• Install "pip-tools" with pip install -U pip-tools
• Compile the requirements with pip-compile --extra dev, -o requirements.txt pyproject.toml --resolver=backtracking
• Sync the dependencies with your virtualenv with pip-sync

Add functionality

• Create a new branch for your feature
• Change the dependency in your requirements.txt to a local (editable) one that points to your local file system: -e /Users/workspace/django-dynamic-admin-forms or via pip pip install -e /Users/workspace/django-dynamic-admin-forms
• Ensure the code passes the tests
• Create a pull request

Run tests

• Run tests

  pytest --ds settings tests
  

• Check coverage

  coverage run -m pytest --ds settings tests
  coverage report -m
  

Git hooks (via pre-commit)

We use pre-push hooks to ensure that only linted code reaches our remote repository and pipelines aren't triggered in vain.

To enable the configured pre-push hooks, you need to install pre-commit and run once:

pre-commit install -t pre-push -t pre-commit --install-hooks

This will permanently install the git hooks for both, frontend and backend, in your local .git/hooks folder. The hooks are configured in the .pre-commit-config.yaml.

You can check whether hooks work as intended using the run command:

pre-commit run [hook-id] [options]

Example: run single hook

pre-commit run ruff --all-files --hook-stage push

Example: run all hooks of pre-push stage

pre-commit run --all-files --hook-stage push

Update documentation

• To build the documentation, run: sphinx-build docs/ docs/_build/html/.
• Open docs/_build/html/index.html to see the documentation.

Translation files

If you have added custom text, make sure to wrap it in _() where _ is gettext_lazy (from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy as _).

How to create translation file:

• Navigate to django-dynamic-admin-forms
• python manage.py makemessages -l de
• Have a look at the new/changed files within django_dynamic_admin_forms/locale

How to compile translation files:

• Navigate to django-dynamic-admin-forms
• python manage.py compilemessages
• Have a look at the new/changed files within django_dynamic_admin_forms/locale

Publish to ReadTheDocs.io

• Fetch the latest changes in GitHub mirror and push them
• Trigger new build at ReadTheDocs.io (follow instructions in admin panel at RTD) if the GitHub webhook is not yet set up.

Publish to PyPi

• Update documentation about new/changed functionality

• Update the Changelog

• Increment version in main __init__.py

• Create pull request / merge to main

• This project uses the flit package to publish to PyPI. Thus publishing should be as easy as running:

  flit publish
  

  To publish to TestPyPI use the following ensure that you have set up your .pypirc as shown here and use the following command:

  flit publish --repository testpypi
  

Maintenance

Please note that this package supports the ambient-package-update. So you don't have to worry about the maintenance of this package. All important configuration and setup files are being rendered by this updater. It works similar to well-known updaters like pyupgrade or django-upgrade.

To run an update, refer to the documentation page of the "ambient-package-update".