ModelAdmin not allowing dynamic fields to be set in __init__. Is it intended behavior?
Jyrki Pulliainen
I discovered yesterday that ModelAdmin does not display fields set in
the __init__ of the custom form. This is due to
django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.get_fieldsets only looking at the
base_field variable of the form *class' instead of the form instance.
This can be circumvented with a factory or by using a metaclass. I
implemented a metaclass version of this just out of curiosity:
https://gist.github.com/1370436
My question is that is this intended behavior or is the problem
outside the scope of the django.contrib.admin? If it it is I'm fine
with that, though I find it a bit confusing that the dynamic form
field creation tips do not apply to forms used in admin. If it's not,
I'm more than happy to look into the issue deeper and try to work a
patch. However, the patch might be quite intrusive and change a lot of
the internal behavior of the django.contrib.admin.
Looking forward on your feedback!
- Jyrki
Anssi Kääriäinen
wrote:
As nobody else has responded, here is my take on this.
These sort of things have a good chance to get included if the patch
is simple. If, as you say, the patch is intrusive, then you will have
harder time to get a reviewer & committer for you patch. If it makes
the admin code more complicated, you will also need to show why this
feature warrants the added complexity.
It is not entirely clear to me why admin should support dynamic forms.
So, first things first: can you give some use cases where this would
be useful, and where you can't use the current admin hooks to
accomplish the use case.
The worst thing that can happen is that you create a big patch, but it
turns out the approach is unworkable. So, second step would be to make
a plan of what needs changing and why. Or you can just write the patch
and see what happens. That risks wasting some effort if you took the
wrong approach. But on the other hand that is pretty effective way to
learn the code base... And in some cases writing the patch directly
needs about the same amount of work as writing the plan.
Unfortunately I do not know the admin & forms parts of the code well
enough to give any advice on the correct approach.
- Anssi