2005-10-24
django and many2many tables
so I was messing around with my tags in my little django app, and was not content with using custom manipulators especially when I wanted the tag field to show up in 'row' of a slave table. so I thought there must be a better way of doing it.
This method uses a custom Field type and hides all the ugliness of making the tags appear the way I want them to.
(which is as space seperated words in a normal input box, with a list of tags underneath it with the ability of letting people add them in the text box), and not as a multiple-select list box, which is the default implementation.
By doing this my 'tags' appear as i want them to on ANY view of the data, AND they also function as lists inside of the code as well.
the hardest part of all this.. figuring out how to convert the incoming post data into a list of ID's. I had no clue on which method to override. After a hour or two of hair-pulling I stumbled on
convert_post_data. which does the job nicely.
2 caveats on the code.
1. The 'Tags' class is hard coded which is not a good thing
2. it requires the new-admin branch.
Thanks to rjwittams for the hint.