Admin List Widgets Need To Be Paginated

[gabreyla@…]

I connected the Django ORM to an existing postgresDB (which we used to use sqlAlchemy to manage/use) and has a lot of data in it. Some tables have upward of half a million rows.

The Django Admin works fine when listing the objects in a table (ei: /admin/users) and it's quite snappy because it only displays 100 objects at a time (the list view is paginated)

But then when I inspect one of the objects (ei: /admin/users/1) then a very lengthy query starts to join and list all items in tables that have a relationship with this object. This happens because some of the admin widgets are not paginated and would want to display all .5 million objects in that single widget. The query is usually too long and the request times out. Usually it times out even earlier at around 100k rows. (1 foreignKey relationship to a 100k table takes 512 seconds, verified using Django-debug-toolbar)

It's quite insane for widget to display all of that info just as much as it's crazy to expect the user to browse (by means of a scrollbar) 100k-1M rows.

The current widgets used in the Admin are "good defaults" for small tables, but *not* good defaults for the general case.

I think that a lot of pain could be avoided for a lot of people if the default widgets used in the Admin were paginated as well just like the list views of the Admin is.

[Tim Graham]

Have you tried ​raw_id_fields?

[gabreyla@…]

I haven't tried that yet actually. It's hardly ideal though. (only the IDs are displayed and you can't browse to select other options)
Do you think it would be possible to replace the current list widget with the corresponding admin list view for that object? So that for example if you specify that the OrgAdmin has a search box on the field 'name', then the 'detailed view Admin' for User will use the Admin list view of Orgs with the search box as the widget to select the Org? (which also means that by default is paginated) (Admin-ception style)

Thank you for replying and sharing!

[Tim Graham]

Actually, you can browse to select other options (click the magnifying glass icon) and those results are paginated with a search box as you describe. Please give it a try!

[gabreyla@…]

Thank you timo, your suggestion works quite well for IDs. Do you know if I can use some other unique column instead of the primary key?

I agree this ticket is now closed

[Tim Graham]

No, I don't think so.

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