Django ordered ManyToManyField in admin interface

Question

I have a legacy database with tables for documents and authors. A third table defines an ordered many to many relationship between the documents and authors, using foreign keys to the documents and the authors and an integer to specify the author order for a given document.

Using Django 1.1.1 (or SVN), is there a way to edit the document authors and their order in an admin page?

Answer 1

This is quick and a bit rough, but it should get you close(r).

from django.db import models
from django.contrib import admin

class Document(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length = 128)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length = 128)
    document = models.ManyToManyField(Document, through = 'Foo')

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

class Foo(models.Model):
    document = models.ForeignKey(Document)
    author = models.ForeignKey(Author)
    author_order = models.IntegerField()

class FooInline(admin.TabularInline):
    model = Foo

class DocumentAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    inlines = [ FooInline ]

admin.site.register(Author)
admin.site.register(Document, DocumentAdmin)

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/models/#intermediary-manytomany http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#inlinemodeladmin-objects

Answer 2

this might help you too - there is some utility in Django to build models for the legacy databases.

I've built a model for mediawiki database using it. It gets most of the things right, but you'll need to tweak the models a little.