django-formative

Flexible non-model data objects in Django's admin using Django forms.

Quickstart

Install django-formative:

pip install django-formative

Then add it to your Django project's INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS += 'formative'

Run syncdb or migrate to get the database up to date.

Formative Types

Now it's time to define a formative type. Create a file called formative_types.py in a app that's in the INSTALLED_APPS list. In this file you can define forms and register them with formative:

from django import forms
from formative.forms import FormativeForm
from formative.models import FormativeBlob
from formative.registry import FormativeType

class SimpleForm(FormativeForm):
    name = forms.CharField()
    body = forms.CharField(widget=forms.Textarea)

class SimpleType(FormativeType):
    form_class = SimpleForm

FormativeBlob.register(SimpleType)

Then add the following to your project's urls.py, right next to the call to admin.autodiscover():

import formative
formative.autodiscover()

That's it. Now you can create formative objects in the admin using your simple form.

Inline Formative Types

You can also associate formative data with other models. Register the types you want to use with the InlineFormativeBlob model:

from formative.models import InlineFormativeBlob

InlineFormativeBlob.register(SimpleType)

Then use the InlineFormativeBlobAdmin and FormativeBlobInline for the model's admin class:

from django.contrib import admin
from formative.admin import InlineFormativeBlobAdmin, FormativeBlobInline
from yourproject.models import Book

class BookAdmin(InlineFormativeBlobAdmin):
    inlines = [FormativeBlobInline]

admin.site.register(Book, BookAdmin)

You'll now be able to add formative objects to Book instances.

Using formative data

You probably want to use the data in some way. Simply get an instance of a FormativeBlob by its unique_identifier and access the data property as a dictionary:

from formative.models import FormativeBlob
>>> f = FormativeBlob.objects.get(unique_identifier='simple')
>>> f.unique_identifier
'simple'
>>> f.data['name']
'test'

Template tags

Django-formative also provides a templatetag to use the data in your templates:

{% load formative_tags %}
{% get_blob 'simple' as simple %}
{{ simple.unique_identifier }}
{{ simple.data.name }}
{{ simple.data.body }}