An AJAX Select Widget for Django

This widget was written to replace the standard <select> form element Django uses for releated objects in forms. The widget is an extended version of the ​Dojo Select widget. I use this mostly in places where the number of objects in the related objects table exceeds 20 or more. The widget is extracted from a project where some tables have more than 30,000 objects and using a <select> dropdown simply did not scale. This widget supports live lookup of related fields based on a single field in that model and autocompletion.

Credit goes to Eric Moritz's original implementation for inspiring this one.

Screenshots

The selection available after clicking the down arrow:

Selections filtered after typing the letter b:

Requirements

    def __str__(self):
        return self.headline

URLconf

Add a url to the applications urls.py for the reporter_lookup view like so:

from myproject.myapp.models import Reporter

reporter_lookup = {
        'queryset': Reporter.objects.all(),
        'field': 'first_name', # this is the field which is searched
        #'limit': 10, # default is to limit query to 10 results. Increase this if you like.
        #'login_required': False, # default is to allow anonymous queries. Set to True if you want authenticated access.
}

urlpatterns = patterns('',
        (r'^reporter_lookup/$', 'myproject.myapp.views.json_lookup', reporter_lookup),
)

Now test your new reporter_lookup view my going to http://localhost:8000/myapp/reporter_lookup/?q=, which should return something like:

[["Reporter 1", 1], ["Reporter 2", 2], ...]

Template

Normally you would have just put {{ form.reporter }} somewhere in your article_form.html template to get a drop down menu with a list of the Reporters. To use the new widget in your form you'll need to add the following javascript and templatetags to your template:

...
{% load formtags %}
{% block extrahead %}
{% comment %}
load dojo and the select widget
{% endcomment %}
<script type="text/javascript" src="/media/js/dojo/dojo.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    dojo.require("dojo.widget.*");
    dojo.setModulePrefix("nong.widget","../nong/widget");
    dojo.widget.manager.registerWidgetPackage("nong.widget");
    dojo.require("nong.widget.NongSelect");
</script>
{% endblock %}
...
{% comment %}
Two templatetags are included for your convenience. The first, {% fieldrow ... %} splits out a form element similar in style to the
Django Admin with the field's help_text displayed.
The second, {% selectrow ... %}, splits out all the markup and javascript necessary for the AJAX select widget.

Replace the usual {{ form.reporter }} element in the template with this:
{% endcomment %}
{% fieldrow form.headline %}
{% fieldrow form.pub_date %}
{% selectrow form.reporter "/myapp/reporter_lookup/?q=%{searchString}" "first_name" %}
...

That's it! You should be able to submit this form just like you normally would.

Matthew Flanagan (mattimustang A T gmail.com).