Quick generation of CRUD generic views for django!
MIT License
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With django-generic-scaffold you can quickly create CRUD generic class based views for your models so you will have a basic CRUD interface to your models by writing only a couple of lines of extra code! The purpose of this CRUD interface is, as opposed to django-admin, to be used by users and not staff members.
django-generic-scaffold is different from other scaffolding tools because it generates all views/url routes on-the-fly (by creating subclasses of normal django class-based views) and not by outputing python code. This way you can re-configure your views anytime you wish.
As you can understand the main purpose of this library is to be able to add CRUD for as many models in your project with as little mental effort as possible. Nothing beats the django-admin for that of course but usually you don't want to give access to /admin to all the users that will do data entry. I've found this project to be invaluable to my work (I mostly create apps to by used internally by the members of a public sector org); I guess it should also be very useful when you need to create a quick MVP for your project.
I've added an example project of using django-generic-scaffold: https://github.com/spapas/generic-scaffold-demo
Install it with pip install django-generic-scaffold
, or if you want to use the latest version on github, try pip install git+https://github.com/spapas/django-generic-scaffold
.
If you want to use the template tags and the fallback templates of django-generic-scaffold, please put generic_scaffold
in your INSTALLED_APPS
setting. If you
don't need the template tags or fallback templates then no modifying of your settings is needed, just go ahead and use it!
Let's say you have defined a model named Book
in your models.py
. In your views.py
or, even better in a module named scaffolding.py
define a class that overrides CrudManager
:
.. code-block:: python
from generic_scaffold import CrudManager
import models
class BookCrudManager(CrudManager):
model = models.Book
prefix = 'books'
Now, include the following lines to the urls.py
of your application:
.. code-block:: python
from scaffolding import BookCrudManager # or from views import BookCrudManager depending on where you've put it
book_crud = BookCrudManager()
# [...] define your urlpatters here
urlpatterns += book_crud.get_url_patterns()
You may now visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/books
(or whatever was your prefix
) to get a list of your Book
instances.
The following methods have also been created:
http://127.0.0.1:8000/bookscreate
http://127.0.0.1:8000/booksdetail/<id>
http://127.0.0.1:8000/booksupdate/<id>
http://127.0.0.1:8000/booksdelete/<id>
If you don't do anything else, the default fallback templates will be used (they are ugly and should only be used for testing).
You should add a template named app_name/testmodel_list.html
(which is the default template for the ListView
) to override
the fallback templates - please read the next section for more info on that.
The prefix
option you set to the BooksCrudManager
method will just prepend this prefix to all created urls
and can also be used to get your url names for reversing.
There's a bunch of fallback templates that will be used if no other template can be used instead. These template are for testing purposes only and should be overriden (unless you want to quickly see that everything works). Now, there are two ways you can redefine your templates:
app_name
and TestModel
you can add the following templates:For create/update add app_name/testmodel_form.html
,
for list add app_name/testmodel_list.html
,
for detail add app_name/testmodel_detail.html
,
for delete add app_name/testmodel_confirm_delete.html
.
action_template_name
configuration option to explicitly set which templates will be used for each action. The action
could be list, detail, update, create
or delete
. So to configure the detail template name to be foo.html
you'll use the option detail_template_name = 'foo.html'
.So, the priority of templates is:
Most of the time, you'll need to configure three things before using django-generic-scaffold
: The form class used for create and update views, the access permissions for each generic class based view and the templates that each view will use. These can be configured just by settings attributes to your CrudManager
class.
form_class
.permissions
attribute to a dictionary of callables. The keys of that dictionary should be list, detail, update, create
or delete
while the values should be callables like login_required
or permission_required('permission')
etc.action_template_name
.For any other configuration of the generated class based views you'll need to define mixins that will be passed to the generated CBV classes as a list using the option action_mixins
(again action is either list, detail
, etc).
Using mixins you can do whatever you want to your resulting CBV classes -- also, by forcing you to use mixins django-generic-scaffold will help you follow bet code practices (DRY).
However, sometimes mixins are not enough and you may need to completely override the parent Views to use something else. For this, you may set the action_view_class
property to your own parent class view (i.e list_view_class = OverridenListView
).
If you want to use the provided template tags to your templates, you'll need to add {% load generic_scaffold_tags %}
near
the top of your template. Then you may use set_urls_for_scaffold
which will output the URLs of the
selected scaffold depending on your configuration. This tag can receive
three parameters: The django app name, the model name and the prefix name. You can either use
the combination of app name / model name or just the prefix.
It will return a dictionary with all
the scaffolded urls for this model. For example, to get the url names for the model test2
(careful you must use the internal model name so for Test2
use test2
)
belonging to the app test1
you'll use {% set_urls_for_scaffold "test1" "test2" as url_names %}
and then you could use the attributes list, create, detail, update, delete
of that object to reverse and get the corresponding urls, for example
use {% url url_names.list }
to get the url for list.
There's also a similar API function named get_url_names that
you can use to get the urls for your scaffolds.
For example, you can do something like:
.. code-block:: python
from generic_scaffold import get_url_names
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
names = get_url_names(prefix='test')
list_url = reverse(names['list'])
Please notice above that if you need to call the above template tag or function with the prefix you need to pass the parameter name i.e call it like {% set_urls_for_scaffold prefix="my_prefix" as url_names %}
.
Finally, if for some reason you'd prefer to access the url name directly without using the above you can generate the url name of a scaffolded view yourself using the following algorithm: {prefix}_{app_name}_{model_name}_{method}
where the method is one of list/create/update/detail/delete. This could then be used directly with {% url %}
or reverse
.
A sample config that uses a different form (TestForm
), defines different behavior using mixins for create and update and needs a logged in user for update / delete / create (but anonymous users can list and detail) is the following:
.. code-block:: python
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
class TestCrudManager(CrudManager):
prefix = 'test'
model = models.TestModel
form_class = forms.TestForm
create_mixins = (CreateMixin, )
update_mixins = (UpdateMixin, )
permissions = {
'update': login_required,
'delete': login_required,
'create': login_required,
}
As can be seen from tox.ini, the tests are run for Python for Python 3.8 and Python 3.11 with Django 3.2-5, so these are the supported versions. Intermediate versions should also work without problems.
.. list-table:: Python Django Version Support :widths: 25 25 :header-rows: 1
Here are some more tricks and advice to make even better usage of this package:
For a model called Company
I would use a prefix "companies/"
(notice the slash at the end). This may seem a little strange at first but it creates nice looking urls like: /companies/
(for list), /companies/detail/3
(for detail) etc.
Add a get_absolute_url
method to your models to avoid having to declare where to redirect after a successful post when creating/editing instances. For example for the same Company model I'd do it like this:
.. code-block:: python
from generic_scaffold import get_url_names
class Company(models.Model):
def get_absolute_url(self):
return reverse(get_url_names(prefix='companies/')['detail'], args=[self.id])
Company
example you could add the following template tag to the company related templates:.. code-block:: python
{% load generic_scaffold_tags %} [...] {% set_urls_for_scaffold prefix="companies/" as co_url_names %}
And then you'd be able to access the urls like: {% url co_url_names.list %}
or {% url co_url_names.detail %}
.
As mentioned above, If for some reason you'd prefer to access the url name directly you can generate yourself using the following algorithm: {prefix}_{app_name}_{model_name}_{method}
. Thus for our Company
example, if the app name is called core
the name of the list view would be companies/_core_company_detail
(notice that the prefix is companies/
).
Sometimes django-generic-scaffold creates more views than you'd like! For example, for various reasons I usually avoid having delete views. Also for small models you may don't need a detail view. To "disable" a view you can use the following simple mixin:
.. code-block:: python
from django.core.exceptions import PermissionDenied
class NotAllowedMixin(object, ): def get_queryset(self): raise PermissionDenied
Then when you define your CrudManager
use that as the mixin for your method, for example if you want to disable delete you'll add:
delete_mixins = (NotAllowedMixin, )
. I guess it would be better if the CrudManager
had a way to actually define which methods you need but this solution is much easier (for me) :)
If you want to change the fields that appear in the Create/Update views you'll need to define a form_class
. Without it all fields will be visible.
You'll probably need to fix your query to avoid n+1 problems. This can easily be done with a mixin like this:
.. code-block:: python
class FixQuerysetMixin(object, ): def get_queryset(self): return super(FixQuerysetMixin, self).get_queryset().select_related( 'field1', 'field2' )
You can then add that mixin to either your CrudManager
corresponding list_mixins
or detail_mixins
list.
list_mixins
to auto-add both a table and a filter to your list view:.. code-block:: python
import filters, tables
class AddFilterTableMixin(object, ): def get_context_data(self, **kwargs): context = super(AddFilterTableMixin, self).get_context_data(**kwargs) qs = self.get_queryset() filter = getattr(filters, self.model.name+'Filter')(self.request.GET, qs) table = getattr(tables, self.model.name+'Table')(filter.qs) RequestConfig(self.request, paginate={"per_page": 15}).configure(table) context['table'] = table context['filter'] = filter return context
This will try to find a filters.XFilter
and tables.XTable
class in the filters
and tables
modules (you need to import them ofcourse). So if your model name is Company
it will use the CompanyFilter
and CompanyTable
classes!
Now this could be made even more DRY by using some type
magic to auto-generate the table and filer class on the fly; however I've concluded that you'll almost always need to configure them to define which fields to display at the table and which fields to use at te filter so I don't think it's really worth it.
generic_scaffold/{list, detail, form, confirm_delete}.html
)