Django Lookup Tables

Efficient storage and management of lookup tables used throughout an app.

Note: This package is a work in progress (that's why it's not yet at version 1.0). I am active seeking contributions to help with making it more usable, see "Contributing" below.

IMPORTANT

This software is still pre-release. Upgrades from one version to the next may create unstabilities in your project. If you have used any version prior to 1.0.0, please read the Release Notes for Beta Versions.

Installation

Install the package:

$ pip install django-lookup-tables

Add it to your installed apps:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'lookup_tables',
    ...
)

Usage

The primary use case for lookup tables is to create user-managed lists of options for models to choose from. Consider a model with a field called, for instance, state:

from django.db import models
from lookup_tables.fields import LookupTableItemField

CHOICES = (('draft', 'draft'), ('published', 'published'))

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    state = models.CharField(choices=CHOICES)

While this is easy to build, changing the choices list requires rebuilding and redeploying your application.

The above model could instead be written as:

from django.db import models
from lookup_tables.models import AbsractLookupTable
from lookup_tables.fields import LookupField

class PostState(AbstractLookupTable):
    pass

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    state = LookupField(PostState)

This will create a lookup table called PostState that can be administered by staff users. You can now set this field to any value from the PostState model.

If you register your model in the app's admin.py:

from django.contrib import admin
from lookup_tables.admin import LookupAdmin
from .models import PostState

@admin.register(PostState)
class PostStateAdmin(LookupAdmin):
    pass

... you will be able to modify the values in the table through the "Post State" link in the Django admin.

django-lookup-tables integrates properly with forms out of the box, so all UI naturally gets up-to-date selection lists just like if you were using a CharField with a choices enum or tuple list.

Each table has an arbitrary list of items. You can order them by setting the "Sort Order" field to any positive integer.

Using with Admin-Sortable2

If you have django-admin-sortable2 installed, you can take advantage of it's UI enhancements by configuring django-lookup-tables to use it. In your settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'adminsortable2',
    'lookup_tables',
    ...
)

LOOKUP_TABLES = {
    'USE_ADMIN_SORTABLE2': True,
}

Using with Django REST Framework

Fields on models will render the same way CharField does if you use the drf_fields.LookupSerializerField field on your serializer like so:

class PostSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    class Meta:
        fields = ('id', 'title', 'state')

    state = LookupSerializerField(PostState)

By default, the field will send the id of the LookupTableItem. If you instead want to send the name property, add DRF_REPRESENTATION_NAME_NOT_ID to your settings.py:

LOOKUP_TABLES = {
    # ...
    'DRF_REPRESENTATION_NAME_NOT_ID': True,
    # ...
}

The HTML UI provided by DRF will populate dropdowns, and the OPTIONS response handler will supply all key/value pairs available for the field:

OPTIONS /api/posts/1/
HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "name": "Post Instance",
    "description": "",
    "renders": [
        "application/json",
        "text/html"
    ],
    "parses": [
        "application/json",
        "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
        "multipart/form-data"
    ],
    "actions": {
        "PUT": {
            "id": {
                "type": "integer",
                "required": false,
                "read_only": true,
                "label": "ID"
            },
            "title": {
                "type": "string",
                "required": true,
                "read_only": false,
                "label": "Name",
                "max_length": 200
            },
            "state": {
                "type": "choice",
                "required": true,
                "read_only": false,
                "label": "State",
                "choices": [
                    {
                        "value": 14,
                        "display_name": "Draft"
                    },
                    {
                        "value": 18,
                        "display_name": "Published"
                    }
                ]
            }
        }
    }
}

Sample App

You can see a sample app using these fields buy running the following:

$ python manage.py migrate
$ python manage.py loaddata fixtures/base.json
$ python manage.py runserver

This app has the following endpoints:

/admin/
/api/mymodel/
/api/mymodel/<id>/

The username for the admin user is admin, and the password is pass.

Contributing

I am actively seeking contributions to this package. Check the "Issues" section of the repository for my current hit list.

If you have suggestions for other features I am open to hearing them. Use the "Issues" section of the repository to start a conversation.