Rachel’s Blog

I wanted to start writing a Django app which was to allow a user to enter data in various tables, and then run a workflow process.

I liked the admin front-end but thought I needed to do something clever with generic views to replicate this in my own application.

So I asked this question on the django-users list

On 04/09/05, Rachel Willmer  wrote:
> I want to use the generic view mechanism to add/change/delete but I
> don't want to have to write my own form template for each page.
>
> I'd like it to work just like the admin interface does. Is it
> possible/sensible to hook into the admin code which seems to use
> add_stage/change_stage to automatically generate the templates? Or is
> there a better way of doing this?
>
> Any pointers welcome...
> Rachel

Now I’ve read a bit more about it, the answer is of course to just use the admin interface.

django-admin.py includes a useful command “adminindex”, which will auto-generate a copy of the admin interface index page.

So generate that, and copy it into your template directory to over-ride the inbuilt one, as described in Tutorial2

Then you can modify that as you wish…

Hey presto, instant application front end that you can use as the basis for the new application…

In retrospect, this is obvious and documented in the Django tutorial. But at the time, I was thinking in terms of “admin” interface and “main” interface, and it slipped past me that I could in fact use the admin interface *as* the main interface…

That might not work too well for most web applications, but for my purposes, (a local single-user application), it will work just fine…

Rachel

To help me get to grips with Django quickly, I created a search engine
of the documentation.

On the off-chance this is useful to others, I made it available at http://www.hobthross.com/docs/django/phpdig/search.php

(Sorry if this does not show up as a hyperlink, WordPress appears to be chewing that up and ignoring it)