Global Variables in Django Admin Site - python

This was my original question, but it was not answered and so I thought Id post again with some of the strategies that I have tried, and be a little more specific.
I want to create a dynamic admin site, that based on if the field is blank or not will show that field. So I have a model that has a set number of fields, but for each individual entry will not contain all of the fields in my model and I want to exclude based on if that field is blank. My project is about bridges, and so to put it in practical terms I have a model that has every bridge part in it (this roughly is equivalent to 100), but each individual bridge (mapped to each unique brkey) will not have all 100 bridge parts. And so, I can prepopulate all of the fields it does have, but then the admin site has 100 other fields, and I would like to not display those fields that were not used on my admin site for that specific bridge, but those fields will differ with pretty much every bridge.
Like I said before, I have a unique bridge identifier(a unique 15 digit string), that correlates to each bridge, and then all of the various different variables that describe the bridge.
I have it set up now that the user will go to a url with the unique bridgekey and then this will create an entry of that bridge. So (as i am testing on my local machine) it would be like localhost/home/brkey and that code in my views.py that corresponds to that url is
Is this a final route that I have to take? I am very new to JavaScript and so I do not want to take this route but I will if I have to. Also does Django use Javascript in anyway that is syntactically different? If so I cannot find any Django documentation on incorporating Javascript into my admin site.
A final option that I have exhausted is to use global variables. Instead of having the url that creates the entry in my Views.py, I placed it in my admins.py, and had my modelAdmin class in there as well, so like this.
admins.py
-set up global variable
bridgekey_unique = " "
If I can find a way to either pass that unique bridge key to my modelAdmin class, or figure out if that said field is blank because the bridge doesnt have that part, I will be able to achieve what I want without using Javascript. I have tried a lot of variations of all two of theses strategies to no avail, but have not tried the JavaScript idea as I dont really know any javascript at all.
Sorry for the lengthy post, but people said I wasnt specific enough. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I didn't read all of that - sorry, there's too much. But I did notice your comment that you expect to access in your modeladmin definition a variable that you set in your view. That can't possibly work.
Anything at class level is always executed when the module containing the class is first imported. That is when the server process starts up, so there is no possible way anything done in the view can have happened yet.
You almost never want to have any logic at class level. You need to put it in methods, which are called at the relevant time. In this case, you probably need to use the get_fields method.
Edit
Looking further up at your attempt at a get_fields method, I can't see at all what you are trying to do here. 'prestressed_concrete_deck' is a literal string, and could never be None, so neither of your conditions can ever be true. And as to your question about what the parameters are, the documentation for that method explains clearly that obj is the object being edited.

Related

How can I add a changeable "subfield" to a ModelField in django?

I'm trying to create a kind of "subfield" for a CharField in django, but I'm not sure (a) if it is possible at all and (b) how to succeed if it is indeed possible.
Let's say I want a model for Tools. They would have a, e.g., a field for long_name, short_name, maybe a ForeignKey for realizing different departments. One of these tools I'd like to be a Link, the said "subfield" being a URLField with the href to the webpage.
Now, I can create multiple link entries with the associated URL, but I'd rather have only one tool called "Link" with the changing URL attached. Is this a case for ForeignKey as well? Does it make sense to have a model with only one field (well, two if you count the pkid) in it?
Or am I on a completely lost path here?
If I've understood you correctly, you want to have a number of links that can be attached to a Tool model, so instead of just having a single URLField you would have a Many-to-One relation with a Link model:
class ToolLink(models.Model):
url = models.URLField(...
class Tool(models.Model):
links = models.ForeignKey(ToolLink, ...
The problem is that you only want one particular tool to be able to hold links. Your options are to create a 'Tool' base model that then has multiple different types of tool, like 'StandardTool', 'LinkTool', etc. or to setup some logic that monitors whether the Tool has links or not (or if another tool already has links) and whether creating links is acceptable.

Create a dynamic admin site

I want to create a dynamic admin site, that based on if the field is blank or not will show that field. So I have a model that has a set number of fields, but for each individual entry will not contain all of the fields in my model and I want to exclude based on if that field is blank.
I have a unique bridge identifier, that correlates to each bridge, and then all of the various different variables that describe the bridge.
I have it set up now that the user will go to a url with the unique bridgekey and then this will create an entry of that bridge. So (as i am testing on my local machine) it would be like localhost/home/brkey and that code in my views.py that corresponds to that url is
However, not every bridge is the same and I have a lot more variables that I would like to include in my model but for now I am just testing on two : prestressed_concrete_deck and reinforced_concrete_coated_bars. What I want is to dynamically create the admin site to not display the prestressed_concrete_deck variable if that field is blank. So instead of displaying all of the variables on the admin site, I want to only display those variables if that bridge has that part, and to not display anything if the field is blank.
Another possible solution to the problem would be to get that unique identifier over to my admins.py. I cant figure out either how to get that individual key over as then I could query in the admins.py. If i knew how to access the bridgekey, I could just query in my admins.py dynamically. So how would I access the brkey for that entry in my admins.py (Something like BridgeModel.brkey ?)
I have tried several different things in my admin.py and have tried the comments suggestion of overwriting the get_fields() method in my admin class, but I am probably syntactically wrong and I am kind of confused what the object it takes exactly is. Is that the actual entry? Or is that the individual field?
Just override the get_fields method in your ModelAdmin class.
You can check the obj is passed as function argument so you can check which fields are empty. The function needs to return a tuple so, you would check if field1 is None and then return (field1, field2, field3) or (field2, field3) depending on the value of field1.
I was using Django 1.6 which did not support overriding the get_fields method. Updated to 1.7 and this method worked perfectly.

Design ideas for a webapp in Django

I'm working on a user based, social networking type of web application in Django. It's my first one so I would like to make sure I'm using some good practices.
Currently the web app supports two kinds of users. This is represented by two different Groups. When I register a user I assign them to one of these two groups. I also have two apps, one for each type of user. The apps handle whatever things are distinct to a particular type of user. I have another app that handles the actual authentication. This app uses Django's built in User type and assigns them a UserProfile. The two different types of users have their own profiles which extend/inherit from UserProfile.
This works reasonably well, and is fairly reusable since the authentication app can pull the user type from the url and figure out which type of user to create. Since the groups are named conveniently, they can be added to the correct group too.
Is this the best way or are there more preferred, tried and true ways to handle this? It seems like a pretty common enough scenario. I don't want to continue incorrectly reinventing the wheel if I don't have to.
I was thinking of adding another app called, common, or something which would handle things that are common to all users. For example, viewing a users profile page might be something anyone who is logged in might want to do, regardless of what type of user they are.
Thanks!
Easy part first, with 2) you're spot on. That would be the simplest and most effective way of doing that. It makes sense instead of replicating functionality across both applications to have one app that handles things that are common to both user types.
Back to 1)
With both profiles extending from UserProfile, you'd run into the issue of (if you were using get_profile() on a User object - see http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#storing-additional-information-about-users) that you'd get back just a UserProfile object, not knowing which group the user actually belongs to based on the object received. This is because they both extend UserProfile but UserProfile would not be able to be (I believe) abstract, because you want every User to have a pointer to a UserProfile object which may actually be a UserGroup1 or a UserGroup2 object.
What I would suggest you do is make two seperate Models, that do not extend from the same Model (out of necessity): Group1 and Group2. You would store the information that is common to both profiles in the UserProfile of the User object. Then in the UserProfile you would have a ForeignKey to both a Group1 and a Group2 object:
group1 = models.ForeignKey(Group1, blank=True, null=True)
You would have to do the logic checking yourself, to ensure that only one is ever valid (you could just do this in an overridden save() method or something), but then to grab all of a user's data at once, and also know which group they are on you could do the following:
User.objects.filter(username='blahblah').select_related('profile', 'profile__group1', 'profile__group2')
Only one query to the database would give you all the information you'd need about a user, and you'd also know which group they are in (the one that isn't 'None').
I hope that helps.
P.S. I am assuming in this that groups don't just have unique data to each other, but also unique functionality.

Django admin site: how to create a single page for global settings?

I would like to create a single page in the admin site of django where I can change some global variables of the website (title of the website, items in the navigation menu, etc). At the moment I have them coded as context processors but I would like to make them editable. Something similar to what happens in WordPress.
Is this possible?
I can store the data in the databse, but can I have a link in the admin site that goes straight to the first document record and doesnt allow the creation of multiple records (they wouldnt make sense)
Instead of creating a model in the database, would it be possible to change some context_processor from the admin site (I think this would be best)
django-preferences does exactly what you are looking for. The implementation is a bit hacky (particularly the setting of __module__ on the model class to trick Django into thinking it was loaded from a different app), but it works.
This sounds like what the sites framework is intended to help with.
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/ref/contrib/sites/
"It’s a hook for associating objects and functionality to particular Web sites, and it’s a holding place for the domain names and “verbose” names of your Django-powered sites."
The docs make it sound like it's only good for multiple sites, but it's a great place to put stuff in a single-site-per-django model too.
There's an app called django-values that allows you storing of specific settings in the database.

Return template as string - Django

I'm still not sure this is the correct way to go about this, maybe not, but I'll ask anyway. I'd like to re-write wordpress (justification: because I can) albeit more simply myself in Django and I'm looking to be able to configure elements in different ways on the page. So for example I might have:
Blog models
A site update message model
A latest comments model.
Now, for each page on the site I want the user to be able to choose the order of and any items that go on it. In my thought process, this would work something like:
class Page(models.Model)
Slug = models.CharField(max_length=100)
class PageItem(models.Model)
Page = models.ForeignKey(Page)
ItemType = models.CharField(max_length=100) # tells me which model to display
InstanceNum = models.IntegerField() # tells me which instance of which model...
Then, ideally, my template would loop through all the PageItems in a page which is easy enough to do.
But what if my page item is a site update as opposed to a blog post? Basically, I am thinking I'd like to pull different item types back in different orders and display them using the appropriate templates. Now, I thought one way to do this would be to, in views.py, to loop through all of the objects and call the appropriate view function, return a bit of html as a string and then pipe that into the resultant template.
My question is - is this the best way to go about doing things? If so, how do I do it? If not, which way should I be going? I'm pretty new to Django so I'm still learning what it can and can't do, so please bear with me. I've checked SO for dupes and don't think this has been asked before...
I've also looked at Django-cms to see if that helps, but I couldn't get to grips with it.
Any suggestions?
First, some puzzelement.
InstanceNum = models.IntegerField() # all models have primary keys.
In Django, all model are assigned an integer primary key.
The comment doesn't make sense, since you don't need to add a primary key like this. The PageItem already has a primary key.
Also, please use lower case letters for attributes. Only Use Upper Case for Class Names. Please.
"But what if my page item is a site update as opposed to a blog post? Basically, I am thinking I'd like to
pull different item types back in
different orders and display them
using the appropriate templates"
Different types usually means different models. Rather than a vague "PageItem", you probably want to have "Site Update" and "Blog Post" as separate models.
You can then iterate through these various objects and display them in the template.
You can easily have your various Models defined with a method to return HTML information. You don't (generally) want to return fully-baked HTML. But CSS ID or Class information is sometimes helpful.
class SiteUpdate( models.Model ):
page = models.ForeignKey(Page)
item_text = models.CharField(max_length=100)
item_css_class = models.CharField(max_length=64)
Now you can generate this into the template with a simple <div class="{{item.item_css_class}}">{{item.item_text}}</div> and use CSS to handle the formatting details that distinguish site update as opposed to a blog post.
The include template tag can take a variable containing the template to include, so you could loop through a sequence containing the various sub-templates and include them in turn, maybe using a dict to map friendly names to template filenames.

Categories