Current Admin Extensions

This is very cool and helpful - so is the Jannis' post in his blog about doing autocompletion on the admin interface.

But could we have some instructions on how to set up and use ForeignKeyAutocompleteAdmin??

In my admin.py I did something like this:

import django_extensions class TravelLogClientAdmin?(django_extensions.admin.ForeignKeyAutocompleteAdmin?):

related_search_fields = {

'company': ('company',)

}

But I fail to understand how to configure my app to properly serve the django-extensions media...

in my case all I had to do was to put the django_extensions/media folder in my usual media location..

I found it difficult to figure out how to install and use this extension (the demo at flicker seems to be gone). So here are some step-by-step instructions based on what worked for me.

ForeignKeyAutocompleteAdmin

Django Command Extensions includes a new ModelAdmin class called ForeignKeyAutocompleteAdmin which can be used to add a search function to ForeignKey fields on Admin pages. Here is how to set up and use it.

Example models for Authors and Books:

from django.db import models

class Author(models.Model):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

class Book(models.Model)
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    author = models.ForeignKey(Author)

Install Django Command Extensions.

Make sure that the Django Extensions media folder is available in the MEDIA_ROOT directory of your Django settings.py.

Add searching for Authors to the admin of the Book model by extending the new ForeignKeyAutocompleteAdmin? class and adding a dictionary called related_search_fields where the key is the ForeignKey and the value is a list of fields to search on in Author model:

from django.contrib import admin
from django_extensions.admin import ForeignKeyAutocompleteAdmin

class BookAdmin(ForeignKeyAutocompleteAdmin):
    related_search_fields = {
                            'author': ('first_name', 'last_name')
                            }

admin.site.register(Book, BookAdmin)

This creates an Admin interface with two text input fields, separated by a search icon [M]. Text entered in the first field is used to search for matching Author objects. The second field contains the primary key id of the selected object. The search icon opens a popup window to do the searching, if preferred. On the line the text fields are instructions on how to use them.

Author: ______ [M] _____     
        Use the left field to do Author lookups in the fields first_name and last_name.

Author: M? Use the left field to do Author lookups in the fields first_name and last_name.