Using admin views "outside" of admin

[Brad Smith]

Hello all,

Based on other threads I've read here, it seems that the conventional wisdom is that the admin interface is only for low-level access to the database, and isn't designed for anything "fancy", like users with different levels of administrative rights within an app, etc. Ok, I get that, but if I may grasp at some straws briefly I'd like to ask one follow-up that I haven't seen answered elsewhere: my app has a bunch of objects with complicated relationships for which I've devised a reasonably pretty and intuitive editing interface using Django's admin and Grappelli. Since this took a nontrivial amount of effort, I wanted to ask here if there are any tricks I should know about for re-using any views, inlines, etc from that admin interface in a more integrated editing interface with granular access controls, or do I just need to suck it up and rewrite everything from scratch using regular Django forms?

Thanks to anyone who can offer some advice. 

--Brad 

[Gonzalo Delgado]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

El 20/11/13 12:54, Brad Smith escribi�:

> Based on other threads I've read here, it seems that the
> conventional wisdom is that the admin interface is only for
> low-level access to the database, and isn't designed for anything
> "fancy", like users with different levels of administrative rights
> within an app, etc. Ok, I get that, but if I may grasp at some
> straws briefly I'd like to ask one follow-up that I haven't seen
> answered elsewhere: my app has a bunch of objects with complicated
> relationships for which I've devised a reasonably pretty and
> intuitive editing interface using Django's admin and Grappelli.
> Since this took a nontrivial amount of effort, I wanted to ask here

> if there are any tricks I should know about for re-using *any*

> views, inlines, etc from that admin interface in a more integrated
> editing interface with granular access controls, or do I just need
> to suck it up and rewrite everything from scratch using regular
> Django forms?

The django admin code is very extensible and re-usable. The
documentation may not stress this enough, but it is possible to do
virtually anything you want with it.

If I'm understanding your "outside" of the admin concept correctly,
what you want to do is extend the AdminSite[0] class (or maybe not
even that, just create a new instance) and attach the ModelAdmins you
want to it. I think you can even use autodiscover with a custom
AdminSite instance too if you need to have all models from
settings.INSTALLED_APPS attached to it.


[0]
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/ref/contrib/admin/#adminsite-objects

- --
Gonzalo Delgado
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.15 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/

iF4EAREIAAYFAlKNOH4ACgkQzbfdFL5JoUlCVQD6A1TUqYfKbgBDITrpvFblkQfo
nrVMCxnxSPIiREHgJaMBAKTR2auknxE6sX5s62B0j8eiH+AJB1EG1+AxeXoVHlGX
=kthG
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[Brad Smith]

Thanks for the reply! The main thing I'm looking for is the ability to create more granular permissions. For example, I want only the person who creates an instance of something (plus a few admins) the be able to modify that instance. I talk about working "outside" the admin interface because my understanding from other threads I've read is that the admin is designed on the assumption that everyone either has admin privileges or doesn't on a per-class (as opposed to per-object) basis, and if you want more than that you're going to have to build your own editing interface. 

Of course, what I'd love to hear is that I have this all wrong and there's an easy way to implement the concept of object ownership, custom permissions, etc in the existing admin interface. I guess subclassing AdminSite could be a start to this, but at least at first glanceI don't see anything in the docs about replacing or extending the access control mechanism. Anyone have advice along those lines?

Thanks again!

--Brad

On Wednesday, November 20, 2013 5:32:30 PM UTC-5, Gonzalo Delgado wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

El 20/11/13 12:54, Brad Smith escribi�:

[Brad Smith]

...and of course now I find a FAQ item that seems to talk about exactly what I want to do:

  https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/faq/admin/#how-do-i-limit-admin-access-so-that-objects-can-only-be-edited-by-the-users-who-created-them

I'm still curious to hear comments, though, because if this is possible then I'm no longer clear what the conventional wisdom is regarding when and how to use AdminSite vs when it's time to buckle down and write your own interface. 

While I'm at it, and possibly related to the above, ultimately what I'd like to be able to do is load and submit editing forms from within the view interface via AJAX (ie click an icon on an object and the regular content is replaced with the corresponding admin edit form).  It looks like you can add '_popup=1' to any admin url and get something that could work reasonably well for embedding, and then you'd just need some javascript to cause the submit button to use e.g. jQuery.post()... right? 

Any tips/warnings with regard to this?

--Brad