Django autocomplete widgets and views using Tom Select
Project description
Tom Select for Django
Django autocomplete widgets and views using Tom Select.
This package provides a Django autocomplete widget and view that can be used together to provide a user interface for selecting a model instance from a database table.
The package is adapted from the fantastic work of Philip Becker in mizdb-tomselect, with the goal of a more generalized solution for Django autocompletion.
- Tom Select for Django
Installation
Install:
pip install -U django-tomselect
Usage
Add to installed apps:
INSTALLED_APPS = [
# ...
"django_tomselect"
]
Configure an endpoint for autocomplete requests:
# urls.py
from django.urls import path
from django_tomselect.views import AutocompleteView
urlpatterns = [
# ...
path("autocomplete/", AutocompleteView.as_view(), name="my_autocomplete_view")
]
Use the widgets in a form.
from django import forms
from django_tomselect.widgets import TomSelectWidget, TomSelectTabularWidget
from .models import City, Person
class MyForm(forms.Form):
city = forms.ModelChoiceField(
City.objects.all(),
widget=TomSelectWidget(City, url="my_autocomplete_view"),
)
# Display results in a table, with additional columns for fields
# "first_name" and "last_name":
person = forms.ModelChoiceField(
Person.objects.all(),
widget=TomSelectTabularWidget(
url="my_autocomplete_view",
search_lookups=[
"full_name__icontains",
],
# for extra columns pass a mapping of {"model_field": "Column Header Label"}
extra_columns={"first_name": "First Name", "last_name": "Last Name"},
# The column header label for the labelField column
label_field_label="Full Name",
),
)
NOTE: Make sure to include bootstrap somewhere. For example in the template:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Django Tom Select Demo</title>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.3/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-kenU1KFdBIe4zVF0s0G1M5b4hcpxyD9F7jL+jjXkk+Q2h455rYXK/7HAuoJl+0I4" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.3/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-rbsA2VBKQhggwzxH7pPCaAqO46MgnOM80zW1RWuH61DGLwZJEdK2Kadq2F9CUG65" crossorigin="anonymous">
{{ form.media }}
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<form>
{% csrf_token %}
{{ form.as_div }}
<button type="submit" class="btn btn-success">Save</button>
</form>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Widgets
The widgets pass attributes necessary to make autocomplete requests to the HTML element via the dataset property. The Tom Select element is then initialized from the attributes in the dataset property.
TomSelectWidget & TomSelectMultipleWidget
Base autocomplete widgets for ModelChoiceField and ModelMultipleChoiceField. The arguments of TomSelectWidget & TomSelectMultipleWidget are:
| Argument | Default value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| model | required | the model class that provides the choices |
| url | "autocomplete" |
URL pattern name of the autocomplete view |
| value_field | f"{model._meta.pk.name}" |
model field that provides the value of an option |
| label_field | getattr(model, "name_field", "name") |
model field that provides the label of an option |
| search_lookups | [f"{self.value_field}__icontains", f"{self.label_field}__icontains"] |
the list of lookups to use when filtering the results |
| create_field | "" | model field to create new objects with (see below) |
| listview_url | "" | URL name of the list view for this model (see below) |
| add_url | "" | URL name of the add view for this model(see below) |
| edit_url | "" | URL name of the edit view for each instance of this model(see below) |
| filter_by | () | a 2-tuple defining an additional filter (see below) |
| bootstrap_version | 5 | the bootstrap version to use, either 4 or 5 |
TomSelectTabularWidget & TomSelectTabularMultipleWidget
These widgets displays the results in tabular form. A table header will be added to the dropdown. By default, the table contains two columns: one column for the choice value (commonly the "ID" of the option) and one column for the choice label (the human-readable part of the choice).
TomSelectTabularWidget & TomSelectTabularMultipleWidget have the following additional arguments:
| Argument | Default value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| extra_columns | a mapping for additional columns | |
| value_field_label | f"{value_field.title()}" |
table header for the value column |
| label_field_label | f"{model._meta.verbose_name}" |
table header for the label column |
| label_field_label | f"{model._meta.verbose_name}" |
table header for the label column |
| show_value_field | False |
show the value field column (typically id) |
Adding more columns to the tabular widgets
To add more columns, pass a dictionary mapping field names to column labels as
extra_columns to the widget's arguments.
from django import forms
from django_tomselect.widgets import TomSelectTabularWidget
from .models import Person
class MyForm(forms.Form):
person = forms.ModelChoiceField(
Person.objects.all(),
widget=TomSelectTabularWidget(
url="my_autocomplete_view",
# for extra columns pass a mapping of {"model_field": "Column Header Label"}
extra_columns={"first_name": "First Name", "last_name": "Last Name"},
),
)
The column label is the header label for a given column in the table.
The attribute name tells Tom Select what value to look up on a result for the column.
Important: that means that the result visible to Tom Select must have an attribute
or property with that name or the column will remain empty.
The results for Tom Select are created by the view calling values() on the
result queryset, so you must make sure that the attribute name is available
on the view's root queryset as either a model field or as an annotation.
Settings
| Setting | Default value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| TOMSELECT_BOOTSTRAP_VERSION | 5 |
The bootstrap version to use. Either 4 or 5. Defaults to 5. This sets the project-wide default for the bootstrap_version argument of the widgets. You can overwrite the default for a specific widget by passing the |
| TOMSELECT_PROXY_REQUEST | "django_tomselect.utils.DefaultProxyRequest" |
Either a direct reference to a DefaultProxyRequest subclass or the path to the DefaultProxyRequest subclass to use. This class is used to obtain the model details for the autocomplete. In order to simplify the process of creating a custom autocomplete view, django-tomselect provides a |
Function & Features
Modifying the initial QuerySet
If you want to modify all autocomplete queries for a subclassed AutocompleteView, you can use super() with the get_queryset() method.
from django_tomselect.views import AutocompleteView
class MyAutocompleteView(AutocompleteView):
def get_queryset(self):
"""Toy example of filtering all queries in this view to id values less than 10"""
queryset = super().get_queryset()
queryset.filter(id__lt=10)
return queryset
Searching
The AutocompleteView filters the result QuerySet against the search_lookups
passed to the widget. The default value for the lookup is name__icontains.
Overwrite the AutocompleteView.search method to modify the search process.
from django_tomselect.views import AutocompleteView
class MyAutocompleteView(AutocompleteView):
def search(self, queryset, q):
# Filter using your own queryset method:
return queryset.search(q)
Option creation
To enable option creation in the dropdown, pass the URL pattern name of the add page of the given model to the widget. This will add an 'Add' button to the bottom of the dropdown.
# urls.py
from django.urls import path
from django_tomselect.views import AutocompleteView
from django_tomselect.widgets import TomSelectWidget
from .models import City
from .views import CityAddView
urlpatterns = [
# ...
path("autocomplete/", AutocompleteView.as_view(), name="my_autocomplete_view"),
path("city/add/", CityAddView.as_view(), name="city_add"),
]
# forms.py
widget = TomSelectWidget(City, url="my_autocomplete_view", add_url="city_add")
Clicking on that button sends the user to the add page of the model.
AJAX request
If create_field was also passed to the widget, clicking on the button will
create a new object using an AJAX POST request to the autocomplete URL. The
autocomplete view will use the search term that the user put in on the
create_field to create the object:
class AutocompleteView:
def create_object(self, data):
"""Create a new object with the given data."""
return self.model.objects.create(**{self.create_field: data[self.create_field]})
Override the view's create_object method to change the creation process.
List View link
The dropdown will include a link to the list view of the given model if you pass in the URL pattern name of the list view.
# urls.py
from django.urls import path
from django_tomselect.views import AutocompleteView
from django_tomselect.widgets import TomSelectWidget
from .models import City
from .views import CityListView
urlpatterns = [
# ...
path("autocomplete/", AutocompleteView.as_view(), name="my_autocomplete_view"),
path("city/list/", CityListView.as_view(), name="city_listview"),
]
# forms.py
widget = TomSelectWidget(City, url="my_autocomplete_view", listview_url="city_listview")
Chained Dropdown Filtering
Use the filter_by argument to restrict the available options of one
TomSelectWidget to the value selected in another form field. The parameter must
be a 2-tuple: (name_of_the_other_form_field, django_field_lookup)
# models.py
from django import forms
from django.db import models
from django_tomselect.widgets import TomSelectWidget
class Person(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
city = models.ForeignKey("City", on_delete=models.SET_NULL, blank=True, null=True)
class City(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
is_capitol = models.BooleanField(default=False)
# forms.py
class PersonsFromCapitolsForm(forms.Form):
capitol = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=City.objects.filter(is_capitol=True))
person = forms.ModelChoiceField(
queryset=Person.objects.all(),
widget=TomSelectWidget(Person, filter_by=("capitol", "city_id")),
)
This will result in the Person result queryset to be filtered against
city_id for the currently selected capitol formfield value.
NOTE: When using filter_by, the declaring element now requires that the
other field provides a value, since its choices are dependent on the other
field. If the other field does not have a value, the search will not return any
results.
Advanced Topics
Manually Initializing Tom Select Fields
If a form is added dynamically after the page loads (e.g.: with htmx), the new form
fields will not be initialized as django-tomselect fields. In order to manually
initialize them, dispatch a triggerTomSelect event, providing the id of the
form field as a value in detail as follows.
<script>
window.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent('triggerTomSelect', {
detail: {
elemID: 'id_tomselect_tabular'
}
}));
</script>
Development & Demo
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
make init
Then see the demo for a preview: python demo/manage.py runserver
Run tests with make test or make tox. To install required browsers for playwright: playwright install.
See the makefile for other commands.
Release history Release notifications | RSS feed
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