Installation

1. Put ‘inline_ordering’ on your python path

2. Add ‘inline_ordering’ to INSTALLED_APPS tuple in settings file

Usage

For each model that you want to be reorderable with drag & drop, you need to setup an admin class and slightly modify model declaration. This way you can easily apply reordering to existing model classes. You’ll also have to run collectstatic task or copy one file to your MEDIA_ROOT when using Django < 1.3.

Let’s start with a simple example: Gallery has many Images. User might want to reorder the photos in the gallery to fit his likings.

1. Setup your admin inline class to inherit after OrderableStackedInline

   from inline_ordering.admin import OrderableStackedInline
   
   
   class ImageInline(OrderableStackedInline):
   
     model = Image
   
   
   class GalleryAdmin(ModelAdmin):
   
       model = Gallery
       inlines = (ImageInline, )

2. Setup your model to inherit after Orderable

   from inline_ordering.models import Orderable
   
   class Image(Orderable):
     src = models.ImageField(upload_to='gallery/images')
     title = models.CharField(max_length=255)
     alt = models.TextField()
   
   class Meta(Orderable.Meta):
     pass

   As ordering column was named inline_ordering_position, avoid using this name in your model.

   The Meta class declaration is NOT necessary - add it only if you need to set your own meta attributes.

3. Make inline_ordering.js accessible over HTTP

   Since Django 1.3, there is a staticfiles app that django-inline-ordering is aware of. Just run manage.py collectstatic to copy/symlink media files.

   The simplest way, back in Django 1.2, was to copy media/inline_ordering.js to your MEDIA_ROOT.

   If you however believe that would make a mess, take advantage of the ‘INLINE_ORDERING_JS’ setting and set it to a location which should be requested when accessing orderable inlines:

   INLINE_ORDERING_JS = STATIC_URL + '/js/third_party/inline_ordering.js'

Known issues

1. Reordering won’t work for new records until saved. This needs a onchange handler for the record form or some model refactoring.

2. At this point there is no support for tabular inlines. If you would like to approach this problem, fork the project on Github.

Development

A simple test project has been added in fdc2189 under tests/testproject. Use tools/buildenv.sh to build a virtualenv for development and syncdb to create necessary models and admin permissions.

Version 1.0.1 is likely to be the last one, as I’m planning to release a new library to support ordering in Django admin both of inlines as well as on the change list.

Kudos

simon for http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1053/