I had posted a question without any result. I fear it may be how I posed it...
In the admin, I would like the Add button to direct the user to a different view than the normal form (that would simply consist of a search field and button). After the 'search' form has been validated, it would then send the user to the standard add/change form with some instance data. What is the best method to achieve this?
So, I got the Tumbleweeds bronze star for dearth of responses to this question. I ended up partially solving it as follows...
Added a get_urls method to my model's admin
def get_urls(self):
urls = super(MyModelAdmin, self).get_urls()
addl = patterns(',
(r'^add/$', 'MyApp.views.my_add_view)
)
return addl + urls
Created a form for the 'Add' view
from django import forms
from MyApp.models import MyModel
class LookupForm(forms.Form):
pk = ''
url = forms.URLField(max_length=_URLMAXLEN, label='Video URL',
widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'size':'60', 'autofocus':'autofocus'}))
def clean_url(self):
value = self.cleaned_data['url']
# some validation of 'value' here
# ...
self.pk = somefoo(value)
return value
And in views, I redirect to the change form after validating and saving the model instance
from django.shortcuts import render
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
from MyApp.forms import LookupForm
def my_add_view(request):
confirm = ''
if request.method == 'POST':
form = LookupForm(request.POST)
if form.is_valid():
if 'confirm_button' in request.POST:
foo_save() # save model instance
# LookupForm's 'pk' property set during some clean_ method
href = reverse('admin:MyApp_MyModel_change', args=(form.pk,))
return HttpResponseRedirect(href)
elif 'search_button' in request.POST:
confirm = foo_context() # some context from the search results
else:
form = LookupForm()
return render(request, 'my_template.html', {'form': form, 'confirm': confirm})
Unfortunately I cannot achieve my goal of displaying the change form with instance data. Instead of having to save and redirect to the change_form, I would prefer to be able to direct with MyModelForm(instance=some_instance)