Better ArrayField admin widget?

Question

Is there any way to make ArrayField\'s admin widget allow adding and deleting objects? It seems that by default, it is instead displayed just a text field, and uses comma se

Answer 1

This is another version using the Django Admin M2M filter_horizontal widget, instead of the standard HTML select multiple.

We use Django forms only in the Admin site, and this works for us, but the admin widget FilteredSelectMultiple probably will break if used outside the Admin. An alternative would be overriding the ModelAdmin.get_form to instantiate the proper form class and widget for the array field. The ModelAdmin.formfields_overrides is not enough because you need to instantiate the widget setting the positional arguments as shown in the code snippet.

from django.contrib.admin.widgets import FilteredSelectMultiple
from django.contrib.postgres.fields import ArrayField
from django.forms import MultipleChoiceField


class ChoiceArrayField(ArrayField):
    """
    A choices ArrayField that uses the `horizontal_filter` style of an M2M in the Admin

    Usage::

        class MyModel(models.Model):
            tags = ChoiceArrayField(
                models.TextField(choices=TAG_CHOICES),
                verbose_name="Tags",
                help_text="Some tags help",
                blank=True,
                default=list,
            )
    """

    def formfield(self, **kwargs):
        widget = FilteredSelectMultiple(self.verbose_name, False)
        defaults = {
            "form_class": MultipleChoiceField,
            "widget": widget,
            "choices": self.base_field.choices,
        }
        defaults.update(kwargs)
        # Skip our parent's formfield implementation completely as we don't
        # care for it.
        return super(ArrayField, self).formfield(**defaults)