Django AlphaFilter

Django AlphaFilter was designed to work like Django's default date_hierarchy admin filter. It puts an clickable alphabet in the same location as the date hierarchy - at the top of the results list.

Changes in 0.6:

• Switched to Django querysets to retrieve letters. (Thanks to Ales Zabala Alava: https://github.com/shagi)
• Django 1.4 compatible

Changes in 0.5:

• Added a new template tag to render the alphabet filter in a normal template using a queryset and field and optionally specified template.

Changes in 0.4:

• Added the ability to specify a 3rd-party application to apply the alphabet filter without having to modify that code (e.g. django.contrib.auth). The ALPHAFILTER_ADMIN_FIELDS setting is used for this.
• Now includes documentation!

Changes in 0.3:

• The ModelAdmin class can now specify its own DEFAULT_ALPHABET to use instead of the global setting.
• DEFAULT_ALPHABET can now be a callable

Installation

1. The easiest method is to use pip

   pip install django-alphafilter
   

2. If you download the source, you can install it by running the setup.py script:

   cd /path/to/django-alphafilter/
   python setup.py install
   

3. Add 'alphafilter' to your project's settings.py file, so Django will find the templates and template tag.

Default Alphabet

The default alphabet is the list of characters displayed in the admin even if there is no data for that character. As there is data, the letters of the alphabet are enabled. Any characters not in the default alphabet, but that exist in the data, are added dynamically.

Due to issues regarding devising the proper alphabet by language, the default alphabet is a setting named DEFAULT_ALPHABET. The default setting is the ASCII alphabet and digits. You can set the DEFAULT_ALPHABET to a string, list, tuple or callable.

If you only what the ASCII characters, no digits:

DEFAULT_ALPHABET = u'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

For the German alphabet:

DEFAULT_ALPHABET = u'0123456789A\xc4BCDEFGHIJKLMNO\xd6PQRS\xdfTU\xdcVWXYZ'

For the Icelandic alphabet:

DEFAULT_ALPHABET = u'0123456789A\xc1BD\xd0E\xc9FGHI\xcdJKLMNO\xd3PRSTU\xdaVXY\xdd\xde\xd6'

You can override the DEFAULT_ALPHABET on a model-by-model basis by adding a DEFAULT_ALPHABET attribute to your ModelAdmin class like so:

class TestNameAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    model = TestName
    alphabet_filter = 'sorted_name'

    # A blank string only shows the characters in the database
    DEFAULT_ALPHABET = u''

The ordering of the alphabet will not stay the same as entered, it is sorted through Python's list sort method.

Using Alphabet Filter on a Model

In the model's admin.py set alphabet_filter to the name of a character field. For example:

alphabet_filter = 'name'

You also have to create a template for the model (or application) that will override the admin's change_list.html template.

Within your project's template directory, you need to create an admin directory, and a directory with the name of the application, and optionally the name of the model. For example, if you were adding the filter on the Tag model of an application named cooltags, the directory structure would look like:

MyProject
    templates
        admin
            cooltags
                tag

Create a document named change_list.html and put it in either the application (templates/admin/cooltags) directory, to have it work for every model within that application or put it in the model directory (templates/admin/cooltags/tag) to have it work only for that model.

The change_list.html document should only contain one line:

{% extends "alphafilter/change_list.html" %}

Note

You cannot place this template in the admin directory, as it leads to an infinite loop of inheritance.