Create some form of "edit many at once" feature for the admin

[Adrian Holovaty]

[5:54 pm] jacobkm: Hey, what do you think of making a general purpose CSV export/import for all admin pages?
[5:54pm] jacobkm: A way for data entry folks to get lots of info in quickly?
[5:56pm] django34: Sounds like a good idea...How would it handle many-to-one related objects?
[5:56pm] jacobkm: I'm not sure, but probably just with IDs
[5:56pm] jacobkm: Or maybe it wouldn't work if there are relations
[5:57pm] django34: Do you have a use-case in mind?
[5:57pm] jacobkm: Yeah -- Billy's been entering rosters/schedules/etc all day, and it's a PITA
[5:58pm] jacobkm: I could write an excel importer for him, but it would take almost as long
[5:58pm] django34: All of those things have related objects, don't they?
[5:58pm] django34: I guess a roster doesn't, if it's just players
[6:01pm] jacobkm: Well, it's got the team id
[6:02pm] django34: But it doesn't have "many" of something else
[6:02pm] jacobkm: I don't think any of them do...
[6:03pm] django34: such as a team has many players
[6:03pm] jacobkm: It could be an optional admin feature like the add as new thing
[6:04pm] jacobkm: It's just that our admin isn't ideal when it comes to entering a *lot* of information.
[6:04pm] django34: agreed
[6:04pm] jacobkm: I think it would probably be dangerous, so we should be careful about who gets to use it
[6:05pm] django34: There would be some usability issues, such as what to do if 5 records are submitted but one of them has an error in it
[6:05pm] jacobkm: Yeah
[6:05pm] jacobkm: I'd say all or nothing, probably.
[6:06pm] django34: "There was an error in the 'player name' field in record #4"
[6:06pm] django34: Not that bad
[6:06pm] jacobkm: Right, exactly
[6:06pm] jacobkm: (I did something like this for the CMS I build at IDSociety, except it had *no* error checking at all and was bascially a shortcut for me alone)
[6:07pm] django34: I don't see a huge problem with adding this functionality to every admin item
[6:07pm] jacobkm: How would it handle ManyToMany relations?
[6:07pm] jacobkm: That's the most difficult, I think.
[6:08pm] django34: ...Every item without ManyToMany relations, that is. :)
[6:08pm] jacobkm: :)
[6:08pm] django34: For something like a poll, which has multiple choices, I don't think there's a good way of doing it
[6:08pm] jacobkm: It could use comma seperated integers
[6:08pm] django34: The integers would represent choice IDs?
[6:09pm] jacobkm: yeah, something like that
[6:09pm] django34: If so, how would the choices get entered?
[6:09pm] jacobkm: Ah, you'd have to do them seperatly.
[6:09pm] django34: And that gets into humans manually creating IDs, which isn't ideal
[6:09pm] jacobkm: Frankly, though, I only envision this being used on a few limited occasions
[6:10pm] jacobkm: Yeah, I think anyway you slice it, it involves users entering IDs.
[6:11pm] django34: What if there were a Web interface, which would look kind of like Excel and would allow for entering multiple records?
[6:11pm] django34: Sort of like gen.TABULAR but not for related objects
[6:12pm] jacobkm: Yeah, that would be ideal -- but it would be hard to make it fast and slick.
[6:12pm] jacobkm: I've seen web clones of Excel that work well, but all the good ones look like they take lots of work.

[anonymous]

[6:08pm] django34: For something like a poll, which has multiple choices, I don't think there's a good way of doing it
[6:08pm] jacobkm: It could use comma seperated integers 

...snipp...

[6:09pm] django34: If so, how would the choices get entered?
[6:09pm] jacobkm: Ah, you'd have to do them seperatly.
[6:09pm] django34: And that gets into humans manually creating IDs, which isn't ideal

Why not simply use a multiple choice list box, or a checkbox group? That way any ID handling can be hidden from the user.

[Chris Beaven]

It's been a long time, so this needs a decision if this is still an option.
While a good idea, this ticket is a bit vague, so perhaps it should just be closed?

[tsal@…]

I think it's a bit vague, and a bit out of scope for a framework, eh? It might be a neat future feature, but I don't think it should weigh down the road to 1.0.

[frankie@…]

Ideas:

• Any unique data can be used for foreignkeys, this will could specified like "Category.Slug" or "Category.Id".
• For ManyToManys a comma separated list of unique data could be used eg "Tag.Slugs".
• For FileFields/ImageFields only files network accessible to the server could be added and they'd be added with urllib or similar.

Might have a go at this in a wee bit if it's not decided unnecessary. I would probably do it against newforms-admin, since I'd be using newforms-widgets and it'd be in the admin, unless anyone thinks that's a bad idea of course. Thoughts?

[Jacob]

Marking INVALID since this is pretty much a vaporware ticket. Sure, it would be nice, but we'll get there without having a ticket open about it.