Proposal to remove ModelAdmin's collection of actions from superclasses

[Tim Graham]

Hi,

A recent bug report [1] brought up the fact that ModelAdmin collects actions from superclasses. For example:

class BaseAdmin:

    actions = ['a']

class SubAdmin(BaseAdmin):

    actions = ['b']

SubAdmin will have action 'a' and 'b'. The behavior isn't tested and only mentioned in passing in docs for ModelAdmin.get_action(), "Most of the time you’ll use this method to conditionally remove actions from the list gathered by the superclass."

I think the reason for the "collect from superclasses" behavior was to inherit the "delete_selected" action from BaseModelAdmin, however, that reason was obsoleted in a later commit where AdminSite actions were added and delete_selected was moved there.

I propose removing this surprising (to me, at least) behavior and follow normal Python inheritance. If someone wants to inherit actions from a subclass, they should use:

class SubAdmin(BaseAdmin):

    actions = BaseAdmin.actions + ['b']

[1] https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/29917

[2] https://github.com/django/django/commit/bb15cee58a43eeb0d060f8a31f9078b3406f195a

[Adam Johnson]

I agree, it shouldn’t be doing something so surprising and undocumented.

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Adam

[Carlton Gibson]

The idea was that you could define a base admin and have the actions appear without having to redeclare them. 

The only question is are people actually using that? (I can't think of a third-party app that provides an admin with actions that you're meant to subclass for instance — anyone?) 

If not, then the "usual Python behaviour" argument is favourite. (i.e. +1) 

— Carlton

[charettes]

I agree with you Tim. +1 from me.