dingo 0.2.1

Models vs. Objects

dingo can be used to register views for Models or Objects. Views registered for Models are not specific to any instance of the model; they can be thought of as similar to Django admin actions with an [potentially] empty queryset. Instance views operate on single model instances; you can think of them as similar to admin actions that operate on a single object instead of a queryset.

dingo views differ from admin actions in a couple of subtle ways. The most important difference is that they may be injected into third party applications wihthout sub-classing or modifying the application code. dingo views also have a different user interface by default. dingo includes replacement admin templates which show dingo views as buttons in the upper right hand area of the change list and change form views.

Adding Views

If you want to use dingo to add model or object views to your Model’s admin, you can define them either as functions or as methods on the ModelAdmin.

For example, to define the view as a function:

import dingo
import dingo_test.models

@dingo.object_view(dingo_test.models.RstDocument)
@dingo.short_description("Render")
def render(model_admin, request, object_id):

    from django.shortcuts import redirect
    document = dingo_test.mdoels.RstDocument.objects.get(id=object_id)

    return Response()

The same view may also be a method on the ModelAdmin:

class RstDocumentAdmin(ModelAdmin):

    @dingo.object_view(dingo_test.models.RstDocument)
    @dingo.short_description("Render")
    def render(self, request, object_id):
        pass

Note that the use of the short_description decorator defines the label used in the admin user interface, and is optional in this case. If no description is provided, dingo will format the function or method name, similar to how Django formats default verbose names for models.

Adding Views to Third Party Applications

So long as dingo is listed in INSTALLED_APPS before django.contrib.admin, the function-based example above will work as desired. Note that the code needs to be imported to ensure that registration occurs properly.