Re-ordering entries in a model using drag-and-drop

Question

Say I have a blogging app in Django. How can i re-order the posts using a draggable table in the default admin?

It would be best if i didn't have to add any extra fields to the model, but if i really have to i can.

Answer 1

In model class you would probably have to add "order" field, to maintain specific order (eg. item with order = 10 is the last one and order = 1 is the first one). Then you can add a JS code in admin change_list template (see this) to maintain drag&drop feature. Finally change ordering in Meta of model to something like ['order'].

Answer 2

Note on the "It would be best if i didn't have to add any extra fields to the model, but if i really have to i can."

Sorry, but order of information in a database is determined by the information itself: you always have to add a column for ordering. There's really no choice about that.

Further, to retrieve things in this order, you'll need to specifically add .order_by(x) to your queries or add ordering to your model.

class InOrder( models.Model ):
    position = models.IntegerField()
    data = models.TextField()
    class Meta:
        ordering = [ 'position' ]

Without the additional field ordering cannot happen. It's one of the rules of relational databases.

Answer 3

For working code to do this, check out snippet 1053 at djangosnippets.org.