Generic views¶
Wagtail provides several generic views for handling common tasks such as creating / editing model instances and chooser modals. For convenience, these views are bundled in viewsets.
ModelViewSet¶
The ModelViewSet
class provides the views for listing, creating, editing, and deleting model instances. For example, if we have the following model:
from django.db import models
class Person(models.Model):
first_name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
last_name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
def __str__(self):
return "%s %s" % (self.first_name, self.last_name)
The following definition (to be placed in the same app’s views.py
) will generate a set of views for managing Person instances:
from wagtail.admin.viewsets.model import ModelViewSet
from .models import Person
class PersonViewSet(ModelViewSet):
model = Person
form_fields = ["first_name", "last_name"]
icon = "user"
add_to_admin_menu = True
copy_view_enabled = False
inspect_view_enabled = True
person_viewset = PersonViewSet("person") # defines /admin/person/ as the base URL
This viewset can then be registered with the Wagtail admin to make it available under the URL /admin/person/
, by adding the following to wagtail_hooks.py
:
from wagtail import hooks
from .views import person_viewset
@hooks.register("register_admin_viewset")
def register_viewset():
return person_viewset
The viewset can be further customized by overriding other attributes and methods.
Icon¶
You can define an icon
attribute on the ModelViewSet
to specify the icon that is used across the views in the viewset. The icon
needs to be registered in the Wagtail icon library.
URL prefix and namespace¶
The url_prefix
and url_namespace
properties can be overridden to use a custom URL prefix and namespace for the views. If unset, they default to the model’s model_name
.
Listing view¶
The list_display
attribute can be set to specify the columns shown on the listing view. To customize the number of items to be displayed per page, you can set the list_per_page
attribute. Additionally, the ordering
attribute can be used to override the default_ordering
configured in the listing view.
You can add the ability to filter the listing view by defining a list_filter
attribute and specifying the list of fields to filter. Wagtail uses the django-filter package under the hood, and this attribute will be passed as django-filter’s FilterSet.Meta.fields
attribute. This means you can also pass a dictionary that maps the field name to a list of lookups.
If you would like to make further customizations to the filtering mechanism, you can also use a custom wagtail.admin.filters.WagtailFilterSet
subclass by overriding the filterset_class
attribute. The list_filter
attribute is ignored if filterset_class
is set. For more details, refer to django-filter’s documentation.
You can add the ability to export the listing view to a spreadsheet by setting the list_export
attribute to specify the columns to be exported. The export_filename
attribute can be used to customize the file name of the exported spreadsheet.
Create and edit views¶
You can define a panels
or edit_handler
attribute on the ModelViewSet
or your Django model to use Wagtail’s panels mechanism. For more details, see Panels.
If neither panels
nor edit_handler
is defined and the get_edit_handler()
method is not overridden, the form will be rendered as a plain Django form. You can customize the form by setting the form_fields
attribute to specify the fields to be shown on the form. Alternatively, you can set the exclude_form_fields
attribute to specify the fields to be excluded from the form. If panels are not used, you must define form_fields
or exclude_form_fields
, unless get_form_class()
is overridden.
Copy view¶
The copy view is enabled by default and will be accessible by users with the ‘add’ permission on the model. To disable it, set copy_view_enabled
to False
.
The view’s form will be generated in the same way as create or edit forms. To use a custom form, override the copy_view_class
and modify the form_class
property on that class.
Inspect view¶
The inspect view is disabled by default, as it’s not often useful for most models. However, if you need a view that enables users to view more detailed information about an instance without the option to edit it, you can enable the inspect view by setting inspect_view_enabled
on your ModelViewSet
class.
When inspect view is enabled, an ‘Inspect’ button will automatically appear for each row on the listing view, which takes you to a view that shows a list of field values for that particular instance.
By default, all ‘concrete’ fields (where the field value is stored as a column in the database table for your model) will be shown. You can customize what values are displayed by specifying the inspect_view_fields
or the inspect_view_fields_exclude
attributes on your ModelViewSet
class.
Templates¶
If template_prefix
is set, Wagtail will look for the views’ templates in the following directories within your project or app, before resorting to the defaults:
templates/{template_prefix}/{app_label}/{model_name}/
templates/{template_prefix}/{app_label}/
templates/{template_prefix}/
To override the template used by the IndexView
for example, you could create a new index.html
template and put it in one of those locations. For example, given custom/campaign
as the template_prefix
and a Shirt
model in a merch
app, you could add your custom template as templates/custom/campaign/merch/shirt/index.html
.
For some common views, Wagtail also allows you to override the template used by overriding the {view_name}_template_name
property on the viewset. The following is a list of customization points for the views:
IndexView
:index.html
orindex_template_name
For the results fragment used in AJAX responses (e.g. when searching), customize
index_results.html
orindex_results_template_name
CreateView
:create.html
orcreate_template_name
EditView
:edit.html
oredit_template_name
DeleteView
:delete.html
ordelete_template_name
HistoryView
:history.html
orhistory_template_name
InspectView
:inspect.html
orinspect_template_name
Other customizations¶
By default, the model registered with a ModelViewSet
will also be registered to the reference index. You can turn off this behavior by setting add_to_reference_index
to False
.
Various additional attributes are available to customize the viewset - see the ModelViewSet
documentation.
ChooserViewSet¶
The ChooserViewSet
class provides the views that make up a modal chooser interface, allowing users to select from a list of model instances to populate a ForeignKey field. Using the same Person
model, the following definition (to be placed in views.py
) will generate the views for a person chooser modal:
from wagtail.admin.viewsets.chooser import ChooserViewSet
class PersonChooserViewSet(ChooserViewSet):
# The model can be specified as either the model class or an "app_label.model_name" string;
# using a string avoids circular imports when accessing the StreamField block class (see below)
model = "myapp.Person"
icon = "user"
choose_one_text = "Choose a person"
choose_another_text = "Choose another person"
edit_item_text = "Edit this person"
form_fields = ["first_name", "last_name"] # fields to show in the "Create" tab
person_chooser_viewset = PersonChooserViewSet("person_chooser")
Again this can be registered with the register_admin_viewset
hook:
from wagtail import hooks
from .views import person_chooser_viewset
@hooks.register("register_admin_viewset")
def register_viewset():
return person_chooser_viewset
Registering a chooser viewset will also set up a chooser widget to be used whenever a ForeignKey field to that model appears in a WagtailAdminModelForm
- see Using forms in admin views. In particular, this means that a panel definition such as FieldPanel("author")
, where author
is a foreign key to the Person
model, will automatically use this chooser interface. The chooser widget class can also be retrieved directly (for use in ordinary Django forms, for example) as the widget_class
property on the viewset. For example, placing the following code in widgets.py
will make the chooser widget available to be imported with from myapp.widgets import PersonChooserWidget
:
from .views import person_chooser_viewset
PersonChooserWidget = person_chooser_viewset.widget_class
The viewset also makes a StreamField chooser block class available, through the method get_block_class
. Placing the following code in blocks.py
will make a chooser block available for use in StreamField definitions by importing from myapp.blocks import PersonChooserBlock
:
from .views import person_chooser_viewset
PersonChooserBlock = person_chooser_viewset.get_block_class(
name="PersonChooserBlock", module_path="myapp.blocks"
)
Limiting choices via linked fields¶
Chooser viewsets provide a mechanism for limiting the options displayed in the chooser according to another input field on the calling page. For example, suppose the person model has a country field - we can then set up a page model with a country dropdown and a person chooser, where an editor first selects a country from the dropdown and then opens the person chooser to be presented with a list of people from that country.
To set this up, define a url_filter_parameters
attribute on the ChooserViewSet. This specifies a list of URL parameters that will be recognized for filtering the results - whenever these are passed in the URL, a filter
clause on the correspondingly-named field will be applied to the queryset. These parameters should also be listed in the preserve_url_parameters
attribute, so that they are preserved in the URL when navigating through the chooser (such as when following pagination links). The following definition will allow the person chooser to be filtered by country:
class PersonChooserViewSet(ChooserViewSet):
model = "myapp.Person"
url_filter_parameters = ["country"]
preserve_url_parameters = ["multiple", "country"]
The chooser widget now needs to be configured to pass these URL parameters when opening the modal. This is done by passing a linked_fields
dictionary to the widget’s constructor, where the keys are the names of the URL parameters to be passed, and the values are CSS selectors for the corresponding input fields on the calling page. For example, suppose we have a page model with a country dropdown and a person chooser:
class BlogPage(Page):
country = models.ForeignKey(Country, null=True, blank=True, on_delete=models.SET_NULL)
author = models.ForeignKey(Person, null=True, blank=True, on_delete=models.SET_NULL)
content_panels = Page.content_panels + [
FieldPanel('country'),
FieldPanel('person', widget=PersonChooserWidget(linked_fields={
# pass the country selected in the id_country input to the person chooser
# as a URL parameter `country`
'country': '#id_country',
})),
]
A number of other lookup mechanisms are available:
PersonChooserWidget(linked_fields={
'country': {'selector': '#id_country'} # equivalent to 'country': '#id_country'
})
# Look up by ID
PersonChooserWidget(linked_fields={
'country': {'id': 'id_country'}
})
# Regexp match, for use in StreamFields and InlinePanels where IDs are dynamic:
# 1) Match the ID of the current widget's form element (the PersonChooserWidget)
# against the regexp '^id_blog_person_relationship-\d+-'
# 2) Append 'country' to the matched substring
# 3) Retrieve the input field with that ID
PersonChooserWidget(linked_fields={
'country': {'match': r'^id_blog_person_relationship-\d+-', 'append': 'country'},
})
Chooser viewsets for non-model datasources¶
While the generic chooser views are primarily designed to use Django models as the data source, choosers based on other sources such as REST API endpoints can be implemented through the use of the queryish library, which allows any data source to be wrapped in a Django QuerySet-like interface. This can then be passed to ChooserViewSet like a normal model. For example, the Pokemon example from the queryish documentation could be made into a chooser as follows:
# views.py
import re
from queryish.rest import APIModel
from wagtail.admin.viewsets.chooser import ChooserViewSet
class Pokemon(APIModel):
class Meta:
base_url = "https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon/"
detail_url = "https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon/%s/"
fields = ["id", "name"]
pagination_style = "offset-limit"
verbose_name_plural = "pokemon"
@classmethod
def from_query_data(cls, data):
return cls(
id=int(re.match(r'https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon/(\d+)/', data['url']).group(1)),
name=data['name'],
)
@classmethod
def from_individual_data(cls, data):
return cls(
id=data['id'],
name=data['name'],
)
def __str__(self):
return self.name
class PokemonChooserViewSet(ChooserViewSet):
model = Pokemon
choose_one_text = "Choose a pokemon"
choose_another_text = "Choose another pokemon"
pokemon_chooser_viewset = PokemonChooserViewSet("pokemon_chooser")
# wagtail_hooks.py
from wagtail import hooks
from .views import pokemon_chooser_viewset
@hooks.register("register_admin_viewset")
def register_pokemon_chooser_viewset():
return pokemon_chooser_viewset