Question

Can’t find how to do this for some reason.

When clicking the “Add_model Entry” button on the Admin page, I want most of the fields to be filled in with the same values the user put into the previous model instance that they created and saved. (I don’t care about which users, just about the last (youngest) saved instance of a model).

Use Case: The user will be creating instances of this model in batch mode, for example 10 very similar items, so it would be very helpful if most of the info is prepopulated each time they hit the “Add entry” button. They may do this 3-4 times per day, if that mattered for some reason, and each batch would have significantly different values in the fields from the previous batch, but each instance in the batch would be similar. Hence my thought of prepopulating with the most recently saved values.

Contrived Example:

---

class person:<br>
    name= CharField       =>   (obvious)<br>
    interests= CharField  =>   Example (fly, skate, swim)<br>
    age_range= CharField  =>   Example (old, middle, young)<br>

---

batch 1 = people who fly and are old

Jim Smith, Fly, Old
Sara Smith, Fly, Old
Larry Jones, Fly, Old

---

batch 2 = skaters

Sam Samuelson, Skate, Young
Alfred Bob, Skate, Old
Jon Jon, Skate, Old

---

There is much similarity in each batch, but batches can be very different. So I would guess I need a copy of the previously saved model with a new id, (there is no Inheritance here to deal with, but there are ForeignKeys). How do I add it to the “Add Entry” button/site?

Answer 1

As a second option, you could also use the Django Admin Save As functionality. This isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but it would allow users to go to a previous entry, edit some fields, and then save that as a new object, which would be close to the same effect.