The sandman Admin Interface

Activating the sandman Admin Interface

sandman supports an admin interface, much like the Django admin interface. sandman currently uses [Flask-Admin](https://flask-admin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) and some SQLAlchemy, erm, alchemy to allow your resources to be administered via the admin interface. Note, though, that the admin interface may drastically change in the future.

Here’s a look at the interface generated for the chinook database’s Track table, listing the information about various music tracks:

Pretty nice! From here you can directly create, edit, and delete resources. In the “create” and “edit” forms, objects related via foreign key (e.g. a Track‘s associated Album) are auto-populated in a dropdown based on available values. This ensures that all database constraints are honored when making changes via the admin.

The admin interface (which adds an /admin endpoint to your service, accessible via a browser), is enabled by default. To disable it, pass admin=False as an argument in your call to activate. By default, calling this function will make _all_ Models accessible in the admin. If you’d like to prevent this, simply call register() with use_admin=False for whichever Model/Models you don’t want to appear. Alternatively, you can control if a model is viewable, editable, creatable, etc in the admin by setting your class’s __view__ attribute to your own Admin class.

Getting Richer Information for Related Objects

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that the information presented for Album, Genre, and MediaType are not very helpful. By default, the value that will be shown is the value returned by __str__ on the associated table. Currently, __str__ simply returns the value of a Model’s primary_key() attribute. By overriding __str__, however, we can display more useful information. After making the changes below:

from sandman.model import register, Model

class Track(Model):
    __tablename__ = 'Track'

    def __str__(self):
        return self.Name

class Artist(Model):
    __tablename__ = 'Artist'

    def __str__(self):
        return self.Name

class Album(Model):
    __tablename__ = 'Album'

    def __str__(self):
        return self.Title

class Playlist(Model):
    __tablename__ = 'Playlist'

    def __str__(self):
        return self.Id

class Genre(Model):
    __tablename__ = 'Genre'

    def __str__(self):
        return self.Name

class MediaType(Model):
    __tablename__ = 'MediaType'

    def __str__(self):
        return self.Name

register((Artist, Album, Playlist, Genre, Track, MediaType))

we get much more useful information in the columns mentioned, as you can see here: