Question

For the django admin site, for example, I have a model as follow:

class Book(models.Model):
    ...
    author = models.ForeignKey(Author)
    ...

(to make it simple, we assume each book only has one author)

So when I try to add a new Book in admin site, author will display as a dropdown list and I can roll and select the author it belong to.
The problem is that when you get a lot of Authors, it will be hard to find one you want. So someone suggest to use “raw_id_fields” to solve the problem.

I think it works. However, I want better. I want something like a search box inside the same page rather than pop a page to do so. And probably keep the dropdown list at the same time.

What I am thinking is that I probably need to write some customized template. I did some research on this, but I am still confused. I want to know which template I should override and what kind of approach I should use.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

There are several type-ahead / autocomplete plugins for Django admin that will take the place of the standard drop-down list. Here’s a couple: https://github.com/artscoop/django-admin-autocomplete or https://github.com/sxalexander/django-autocomplete