Django admin dropdown of 1000s of users

Question

Hypothetically: I have a model called Car, which relates to one user. My concern is within the default Django Admin. I assign a user to a car via a drop down (this is default Django behavior, so I'm told).

What happens when I have 1000s+ of users to pick from in the drop down. Does the admin deal with this, if so how?

2019: Awesome auto complete field: https://stackoverflow.com/a/54341270/5506400 — run_the_race, Jul 21 '19 at 17:53

score 23 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 14 '18 at 11:15

23

The default admin UI displays a dropdown list. Use the raw_id_fields option to get a pop-up window, via a search button. This window lets you find and select the linked object. See the documentation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.raw_id_fields

By default, Django’s admin uses a select-box interface () for fields that are ForeignKey. Sometimes you don’t want to incur the overhead of having to select all the related instances to display in the drop-down.

edited Apr 14 '18 at 11:15

Tommy Hansen

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answered Feb 16 '13 at 17:20

Mark Lavin

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So does this provide a lookup? Admin users won't know the id? – Prometheus Feb 16 '13 at 17:24
Yes there is a search icon next to the input which can be used to find the id. – Mark Lavin Feb 16 '13 at 19:41

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 16 '13 at 17:32

5

You can look into django-grappelli, which is an app that enhances the admin interface. The documentation describes an autocomplete for ForeignKey or ManyToMany relationships, using raw_id_fields.

answered Feb 16 '13 at 17:32

msc

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score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 29 '15 at 10:47

You can use django-select2 plugin https://github.com/applegrew/django-select2.

You can do something like:

from django_select2 import AutoModelSelect2Field

class CategoryChoices(AutoModelSelect2Field):
    queryset = models.Category.objects
    search_fields = ['name__icontains', 'code__icontains']

class NewsAdminForm(forms.ModelForm):
    category = CategoryChoices()

    class Meta:
        model = models.News
        exclude = ()

# register in admin
class NewsAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = NewsAdminForm
admin.site.register(News, NewsAdmin)

From the new `django-select2` repo: "Django's admin comes with builtin support for Select2 via the [autocomplete_fields](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.autocomplete_fields) feature." — hashlash, Sep 28 '20 at 10:39

Django admin dropdown of 1000s of users

3 Answers3