Django Admin Autocomplete Filter

A simple Django app to render list filters in django admin using autocomplete widget. This app is heavily inspired from dal-admin-filters.

Overview:

Django comes preshipped with an admin panel which is a great utility to create quick CRUD's. The django 2.0 came with much needed autocomplete_fields which uses select2 widget that comes with a search feature that loads the options asynchronously. We can use this in django admin list filter.

Requirements:

Requires Django version >= 2.0

Installation:

You can install it via pip or to get the latest version clone this repo.

pip install django-admin-autocomplete-filter

Add admin_auto_filters to your INSTALLED_APPS inside settings.py of your project.

Usage:

Let's say we have following models:

class Artist(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=128)

class Album(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=64)
    artist = models.ForeignKey(Artist, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    cover = models.CharField(max_length=256, null=True, default=None)

And you would like to filter results in Album Admin on the basis of artist, then you can define search fields in Artist and then define filter as:

from admin_auto_filters.filters import AutocompleteFilter

class ArtistFilter(AutocompleteFilter):
    title = 'Artist' # display title
    field_name = 'artist' # name of the foreign key field

class ArtistAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    search_fields = ['name'] # this is required for django's autocomplete functionality
	...

class AlbumAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_filter = [ArtistFilter]
    
    '''
       defining this class is required for AutocompleteFilter
       it's a bug and I am working on it.
    '''
    class Media:
        pass
	...

After following these steps you may see the filter as:

Now you can also register your custom view instead of using django admin's search_results to control the results in the autocomplete. For this you will need to create your custom view and register the url in your admin class as shown below:

In your views.py:

from admin_auto_filters.views import AutocompleteJsonView

class CustomSearchView(AutocompleteJsonView):
    def get_queryset(self):
    '''
       your custom logic goes here.
    '''
        queryset = Artist.objects.all().order_by('name')
        return queryset

After this, register this view in your admin class as:

class AlbumAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_filter = [ArtistFilter]

    class Media:
        pass
    
    def get_urls(self):
        urls = super().get_urls()
        custom_urls = [
            path('custom_search/', self.admin_site.admin_view(CustomSearchView.as_view(model_admin=self)),
                 name='custom_search'),
        ]
        return custom_urls + urls

Finally just tell the filter class to use this new view as:

class ArtistFilter(AutocompleteFilter):
    title = 'Artist'
    field_name = 'artist'

    def get_autocomplete_url(self, request, model_admin):
        return reverse('admin:custom_search')

License:

Django Admin Autocomplete Filter is an Open Source project licensed under the terms of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.