django-lookup-tables 0.12.2

Combine all lookup tables into a single unified system.

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.

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.fields import LookupTableItemField

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    state = LookupTableItemField(table_ref='post-state')

This will create a lookup table called "post-state" that has a single option, '<DEFAULT>'. You can now set this field to any value from the LookupTableItems model that references the LookupTable.objects.get(table_ref='post_state') table.

In the admin you will see an entry for 'Lookup Tables'. Here you can manage tables and their associated values. Note that the automatically-generated '<DEFAULT>' item can be renamed or removed; this is just created so that the table is not empty on first use.

django-lookup-tables integrates properly with forms and djangorestframework, 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,
}

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.