Add simple interactions to the otherwise static django admin.

PyPI | GitHub | Full documentation

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

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.

Preparation and building

This package uses uv for dependency management and building.

• Update documentation about new/changed functionality

• Update the CHANGES.md

• Increment version in main __init__.py

• Create pull request / merge to "main"

• This project uses uv to publish to PyPI. This will create distribution files in the dist/ directory.

  uv build

Publishing to PyPI

To publish to the production PyPI:

uv publish

To publish to TestPyPI first (recommended for testing):

uv publish --publish-url https://test.pypi.org/legacy/

You can then test the installation from TestPyPI:

uv pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ ambient-package-update

Maintenance

Please note that this package supports the ambient-package-update. So you don't have to worry about the maintenance of this package. This updater is rendering all important configuration and setup files. 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".