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I find the the Django Admin's default models.ManyToManyField widget to be cumbersome to use. It's the HTML select element and if you have a lot of Objects of the "other" model then it's quite impractical to actually find the "other" Objects you want to associate with "this" Object. And if you have a lot of objects of the "other" model it seems to even slows down the rendering of the Admin page.

I'm aware that I can build my own custom admin widget and apply it to my ManyToManyFields as I see fit, but are there any pre-built ones out there that I might use instead? In my dreams, I picture an auto-completing text input HTML widget. Is this even practical/possible to do in the Django admin framework?

Thanks.

Chris W.
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5 Answers5

193

Try using the filter_horizontal attribute on your admin class, for example:

class SomeModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    filter_horizontal = ('users',)

As mentioned in the documentation, "adding a ManyToManyField to this list will instead use a nifty unobtrusive JavaScript "filter" interface that allows searching within the options". filter_vertical does the same thing with a slightly different layout.

Blair
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  • Its Working But how to make this filed read only. I am try read only_fields = ('users',) . But Its shown in single line separated by comma. I want to shown in line break ... – Varnan K Dec 31 '14 at 08:11
7

you could try using a raw id in the admin. and the django docs: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.raw_id_fields

if you are looking for something with auto-complete you might want to look at this as a starting point http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/AutoCompleteSolutions

and finally a very simplistic inline Example:

models.py

class SomeModel(models.Model):
    users = models.ManyToMany(User)

admin.py:

class SomeModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    raw_id_fields = ("users",)
mrfunyon
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4

I haven't actually played with it but I found this promising looking library referenced elsewhere.

It appears to do exactly what I wanted. Rather than loading the entire list of related objects (regardless of how many there are!) and presenting you with a picker to select a few of them, as filter_horizontal does, it presents a search/filter box and uses typeahead/autocomplete calls to retrieve results dynamically. This is great for the case where you have maybe 5000 users and want to pick 3 or 4 of them without waiting for 5k <option> elements to download and render.

Coderer
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0

This is an old question, but I want to add an answer here for people who find this just like I did: this situation is exactly what Django inline admins are for. Specifically, I use TabularInlines with raw id fields for many-to-many relations that have too many choices.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.TabularInline

kloddant
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0

You can try using Inline model as such -

class ManyToManyInline(TabularInline): 
    model = MyModel.many_to_many_field_name.through 
    raw_id_fields = ("render_raw_id_using_this",) 

@register(MyModel) 
class YourAdminClass(AnyBaseClass): 
    exclude = ("many_to_many_field_name",) 
    inlines = (ManyToManyInline,)

Now there is another issue I faced, finding "render_raw_id_using_this" field name.

So, I moved to shell and tried finding fields in through model as such -

In [1]: MyModel.many_to_many_field_name.through._meta.fields 
Out [1]: (<django.db.models.fields.AutoField: id>, <django.db.models.fields.related.ForeignKey: fieldname1>, <django.db.models.fields.related.ForeignKey: fieldname2>)

So, I replaced render_raw_id_using_this with fieldname1

Similarly, you can use these field names to render raw id instead of drop down list in Inline model.

Sumit Badsara
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