django admin inlines (and nested inlines) : how can I get this functionality?

Question

I'm a little confused as to why this sort of functionality isn't default in the admin, but maybe someone can give me a few hinters to how to go about it.

I have a projects application which keeps track of projects and is to be edited through the admin. Each project has numerous ForeignKey related models (links, flatpages, video, image etc.) that could be placed as inlines within the project admin.

(One or two models have nested inlines, so they don't display in the admin (this and this ticket deal with this) )

Instead of being able to edit these models inline on the project admin (which gets messy and difficult to use), I would love a list of all the current instances of that related model, and simple add/edit button for each model which opens a popup with that model's form.

Project Admin:
    - Normal Fields

    - Links:
        -Link 1 (edit)
        -Link 2 (edit)
        + add link <- popup


    - Images:
        -Image 1 (edit)
        -Image 2 (edit)
        + add image <- popup

so on. How would I go about writing this? I only need to do it for one section/model of the admin panel so I don't think writing my own Crud backend is necessary.

Thanks

Answer 1

I implemented something like this in an application once, but since django-admin doesnt support nested inlines (by which i mean inlines within inlines), i followed a slightly different approach. The use case was that you had an invoice (with a few inline attributes) and u had reciepts (again with inline attributes). Reciepts had a foreign key to the invoice model (basically a reciept was part payment of the invoice).

I implemented it by adding a field to the invoice list view which linked to a filtered reciept list view.

So in the invoice admin, there would be:

def admin_view_receipts(self, object):
    url = urlresolvers.reverse('admin:invoice_%s_changelist'%'receipt')
    params = urllib.urlencode({'invoice__id__exact': object.id})
    return '<a href="%s?%s">Receipts</a>' % (url, params)
admin_view_receipts.allow_tags = True
admin_view_receipts.short_description = 'Receipts'

This gives you a link in the list view that takes you to another list view, but filtered by foreignkey. Now you can have inlines for both models and easy access to the related models.