Popup inlines

[Olivier Dalang]

Hi,

Currently, Django has StackedInline and TabularInline.

TabularInlines work very well if you have many related models with few and simple fields.
StackedInlies work very well if you have few related models with more and bigger fields.

But when you have related models with a lot of required fields, and you have a lot of relations, those two UI are not practical.

What about adding a third Inline subclass, which could be called "PopupInline".

It would look much like the tabular inline, but all the fields would be readonly, and adding and editing relations would happen in a popup.

I guess we could reuse some code used for RelatedWidgets, where the same thing happen : you can edit a relation in a popup, and when you finish, you're back to the main form, which is dynamically updated.

I think it would be quite consistent with the rest of django admin, both in terms of user experience and in terms of code logic.
It also replace nested inlines in some cases (which aren't supported yet, and are probably much more complex to implement).

Let me know what you think !

Olivier

[Tim Graham]

Thanks for the idea, but it would be better to make a proposal like this on the DevelopersMailingList as that's where larger design decisions like this happen. I think a proof of concept would likely be needed to give a better idea of what's involved before we could accept a ticket. I'm also interested to see if this could be (at least initially) implemented as a third-party app. That would help gauge whether it's popular enough to justify including it in Django itself. Thanks!