Ability to disable admin pagination

[Marek Kubica <pythonmailing@…>]

Today I needed to disable pagination for Django admin - and ran into trouble, since there is no explicit option to disable it. There is list_per_page but this only controls how many objects are displayed. Its not possible to set it to None because that throws an exception and setting it to 0 creates a ZeroDivisionException which is also not what I wanted. Finally, I set it to sys.maxint, which sure will be enough.

My idea would be to rename this setting (maybe only in newforms-admin not to break backward compatibility) and make None or False the setting for "disable pagination". Of course, this can also be implemented without breakting backwards compatibility, but list_per_page = None sounds odd.

[Marek Kubica <pythonmailing@…>]

I created a thread on this in the ​django-developers Google Group, to find a reasonable solution.

[ubernostrum]

neforms-admin should make this easier; assigning to xian just in case he comes up with some template magic for it.

[shoyer]

Related: #3152

[adamv]

I'm working on a patch for this, basically, the same thing done in r14828, allow custom Paginators, but for the Admin app.

(Possibly there could be a "NullPaginator" class that always put everything on Page 1.)

[kmike]

Isn't this issue fixed?

See ​http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.paginator

[lrekucki]

Replying to kmike:

Isn't this issue fixed?

See ​http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.paginator

One could argue, that Django should also provide the "NullPaginator" class, but you're right that the main issue here is fixed in Django 1.3

[adamnelson]

It is still not trivial to turn off pagination. This makes ModelAdmin impossible to use on many large tables where select count(*) takes a long time (i.e. 1M+ records on InnoDB tables).

Ideally, there would be a NullPaginator available. A nice to have would be to have an option for a 'next and previous only' paginator that doesn't give page counts or estimates of the total number of records, just next and previous page links.

[boxm]

I've been looking at this today and there's quite a few places where the assumption that the paginator is dealing with a countable set is made. Making it work where you don't want to/can't count the number of items in the set means changing:

1. the {% search %} admin tag
2. the {% pagination %} admin tag
3. the ChangeList class (in changelist_view method)
4. the paginator to one that doesn't implement count, num_pages and page_range properties

1 & 2 can be fixed by overriding the change_list.html template to use alternative template tags (e.g. {% infinite_pagination %}). 3 requires deriving from ModelAdmin and cut'n'pasting the entire method. 4 is available here: ​http://code.google.com/p/django-pagination/source/browse/trunk/pagination/paginator.py

However this is really ugly and a lot of work for someone.

I think ideally the template tags and ChangeList class should be updated to not assume the ability to access the count, num_pages and page_range properties - ie have an "UncountedPaginator". Possibly this would be a base class of Paginator so you'd have NullPaginator (displays everything) -> UncountedPaginator -> Paginator.

[adamnelson]

I strongly agree with boxm on this one. Counting the number of records is often most onerous for the very sets that need to be paginated. The UncountedPaginator is a great solution.

[boxm]

Patch that implements above idea on #8408 - this should enable a NullPaginator to work with admin

[aaugustin]

Please don't assigned tickets to people without their consent. I'm not going to work on this.

[collinanderson]

I believe this issue is fixed in 1.8 by the show_full_result_count option (ticket #8408 mentioned above).

​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.show_full_result_count

Can everything else be handled by setting list_per_page to a very large number?