Accessing parent model instance from modelform of admin inline

Question

I\'m using a TabularInline in Django\'s admin, configured to show one extra blank form.

class MyChildInline(admin.TabularInline):
    model = MyChildModel
           


        

Answer 1

Update: As of Django 1.9, there is a def get_form_kwargs(self, index) method in the BaseFormSet class. Hence, overriding that passes the data to the form.

This would be the Python 3 / Django 1.9+ version:

class MyFormSet(BaseInlineFormSet):
    def get_form_kwargs(self, index):
        kwargs = super().get_form_kwargs(index)
        kwargs['parent_object'] = self.instance
        return kwargs


class MyForm(forms.ModelForm):
    def __init__(self, *args, parent_object, **kwargs):
        self.parent_object = parent_object
        super(MyForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)


class MyChildInline(admin.TabularInline):
    formset = MyFormSet
    form = MyForm

---

For Django 1.8 and below:

To pass a value of a formset to the individual forms, you'd have to see how they are constructed. An editor/IDE with "jump to definition" really helps here to dive into the ModelAdmin code, and learn about the inlineformset_factory and it's BaseInlineFormSet class.

From there you'll find that the form is constructed in _construct_form() and you can override that to pass extra parameters. It will likely look something like this:

class MyFormSet(BaseInlineFormSet):
    def _construct_form(self, i, **kwargs):
        kwargs['parent_object'] = self.instance
        return super(MyFormSet, self)._construct_form(i, **kwargs)

    @property
    def empty_form(self):
        form = self.form(
            auto_id=self.auto_id,
            prefix=self.add_prefix('__prefix__'),
            empty_permitted=True,
            parent_object=self.instance,
        )
        self.add_fields(form, None)
        return form

class MyForm(forms.ModelForm):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.parent_object = kwargs.pop('parent_object', None)
        super(MyForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)


class MyChildInline(admin.TabularInline):
    formset = MyFormSet
    form = MyForm

Yes, this involves a private _construct_form function.

update Note: This doesn't cover the empty_form, hence your form code needs to accept the parameters optionally.