Question

I have a form on my Django site (made with ModelForm) where users can submit some data to create new objects or modify existing objects. These data, however, need to be reviewed by our staff before they’re committed to the database, sometimes in bulk at a later date.

I know I can use .save(commit=False) in my form-processing view to return an object that has not been saved to the database yet. But is there a way to collect all of these objects from multiple user submissions for later review? Ideally, I’d have an admin page that had a summary list of submissions with “Commit” or “Reject” buttons.

Answer 1

There’s no one-step-out-of-the-box way to do this (at least not built in to Django), so you’ll need to create the logic yourself, which should be pretty straightforward. Some approaches to consider:

1. Have a second model/table to which your form saves, then create a view for the review functionality which copies any approved records into the first table.

2. Avoid having second model/table and add a approved = BoolField(default=False) field to your model/table. Set objects to a custom manager which filters for default=True so the rest of your code will only see approved records by default. Have a second manager that does the opposite, i.e. filtering for unapproved records. Using this second manager, create a view for the review functionality which flips approved to True for anything that gets approved.

3. If, with the second approach above, you want use Django’s admin site to do the review, create a proxy for your model which by default uses the second manager which filters for unapproved records. Then you can use the admin’s inline display and editing functionality to see records at a glance and click approve as needed.