Why are admin actions not available as buttons in the change view?

[Flo Ledermann]

I am just wondering why the admin actions are only available through
the dropdown in the changelist and not as buttons in the change view
of the object - this is a much requested feature (see
http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/5412 and http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/2409
for slightly outdated examples).

As I know the developers here, there will be a good reason for this,
but I just cannot see it. IMO adding this would be quite trivial and
very useful in a lot of usecases where an action should be applied to
a single object just edited.

I couldn't find any previous posts that would answer my doubts, so can
you please shed some light upon this for me (and stop me working on
this feature if there is a good reason to not support it).

Regards,

Flo

[Jannis Leidel]

Hi Flo,

> I am just wondering why the admin actions are only available through
> the dropdown in the changelist and not as buttons in the change view
> of the object - this is a much requested feature (see
> http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/5412 and http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/2409
> for slightly outdated examples).

Admin actions didn't exist at the time those tickets were opened. See http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/12090 for the recent attempt.

> As I know the developers here, there will be a good reason for this,
> but I just cannot see it. IMO adding this would be quite trivial and
> very useful in a lot of usecases where an action should be applied to
> a single object just edited.

I believe it's a great idea but it needs some thoughts as to how the actions are presented to the user. Showing the admin actions as buttons for example, won't scale if there are a lot of them registered with a model admin class. There is also an inevitable conflict in meaning with the UI elements known as user tools (e.g. "View on site").

> I couldn't find any previous posts that would answer my doubts, so can
> you please shed some light upon this for me (and stop me working on
> this feature if there is a good reason to not support it).

FYI, there was http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/3fee283ae3695352

Jannis

[Flo Ledermann]

Jannis,

thanks for the quick and competent reply. It's always fascinating how
one can fail in searching for existing issues and discussions ;)

Flo