one-to-many inline select with django admin

I have a standard many-to-one relationship set up. There are a bunch of fields, but for our purposes here, the relevant model is:

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

class Student(models.Model):
    class = models.ForeignKey(Class)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
    address = models.CharField(max_length=128)
    # ...etc

I created an admin, and it works great. it even automatically has the ability for me to set the Class when I am editing a Student. However, when I go to create/edit a Class, all I get is an input box for the name.

Is there a way to add a box/field where Students can be added as members of Class from the Class admin page? I can make a form inline, but that is to create new Students. I already have all my Students created and am just looking for a quick method to add multiple existing Students to different Class'.

Solution 1:

There is! You want InlineModelAdmin (see InlineModelAdmin documentation here)

Sample code in brief:

class StudentAdminInline(admin.TabularInline):
    model = Student

class ClassAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    inlines = (StudentAdminInline, )
admin.site.register(Class, ClassAdmin)

Solution 2:

Here is "custom form" solution as Luke Sneeringer suggested. Anyway, I'm suprised by absence of out-of-the-box Django solution to this (rather natural and probably common) problem. Am I missing something?

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

class Foo(models.Model):
    pass

class Bar(models.Model):
    foo = models.ForeignKey(Foo)

class FooForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Foo

    bars = forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField(queryset=Bar.objects.all())

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(FooForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        if self.instance:
            self.fields['bars'].initial = self.instance.bar_set.all()

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        # FIXME: 'commit' argument is not handled
        # TODO: Wrap reassignments into transaction
        # NOTE: Previously assigned Foos are silently reset
        instance = super(FooForm, self).save(commit=False)
        self.fields['bars'].initial.update(foo=None)
        self.cleaned_data['bars'].update(foo=instance)
        return instance

class FooAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = FooForm

Solution 3:

Probably, this will help: I used the described approach, but changed methods save and save_m2m in the following way:

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

class Foo(models.Model):
     pass

class Bar(models.Model):
     foo = models.ForeignKey(Foo)

class FooForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Foo

    bars = forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField(queryset=Bar.objects.all())

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(FooForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        if self.instance:
            self.fields['bars'].initial = self.instance.bar_set.all()

    def save_m2m(self):
        pass

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.fields['bars'].initial.update(foo=None)
        foo_instance = Foo()
        foo_instance.pk = self.instance.pk
        # Copy all other fields.
        # ... #
        foo_instance.save()
        self.cleaned_data['bars'].update(foo=instance)
        return instance

class FooAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = FooForm