Databrowse

Databrowse is a Django application that lets you browse your data.

As the Django admin dynamically creates an admin interface by introspecting your models, Databrowse dynamically creates a rich, browsable Web site by introspecting your models.

Note

Databrowse is very new and is currently under active development. It may change substantially before the next Django release.

With that said, it’s easy to use, and it doesn’t require writing any code. So you can play around with it today, with very little investment in time or coding.

How to use Databrowse

  1. Point Django at the default Databrowse templates. There are two ways to do this:

    • Add 'django.contrib.databrowse' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting. This will work if your TEMPLATE_LOADERS setting includes the app_directories template loader (which is the case by default). See the template loader docs for more.
    • Otherwise, determine the full filesystem path to the django/contrib/databrowse/templates directory, and add that directory to your TEMPLATE_DIRS setting.

  2. Register a number of models with the Databrowse site:

    from django.contrib import databrowse
from myapp.models import SomeModel, SomeOtherModel

databrowse.site.register(SomeModel)
databrowse.site.register(SomeOtherModel)

    Note that you should register the model classes, not instances.

    It doesn't matter where you put this, as long as it gets executed at some point. A good place for it is in your URLconf file (urls.py).

  3. Change your URLconf to import the databrowse module:

    from django.contrib import databrowse

    ...and add the following line to your URLconf:

    (r'^databrowse/(.*)', databrowse.site.root),

    The prefix doesn't matter -- you can use databrowse/ or db/ or whatever you'd like.

  4. Run the Django server and visit /databrowse/ in your browser.

Requiring user login

You can restrict access to logged-in users with only a few extra lines of code. Simply add the following import to your URLconf:

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required

Then modify the URLconf so that the databrowse.site.root() view is decorated with django.contrib.auth.decorators.login_required():

(r'^databrowse/(.*)', login_required(databrowse.site.root)),

If you haven't already added support for user logins to your URLconf, as described in the user authentication docs, then you will need to do so now with the following mapping:

(r'^accounts/login/$', 'django.contrib.auth.views.login'),

The final step is to create the login form required by django.contrib.auth.views.login(). The user authentication docs provide full details and a sample template that can be used for this purpose.

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