Improving ManyToManyField with relational databse

[danielcatao]

Relational databases handle a manyToMany relation with a pivot table (ex. people_banks).

A JSON representation of the same relationship could be: [{"people_id":1, "bank_id":2,"account_type":"gold" }]

A django-jsonform view of this case is:

Today the default Django Admin closest way to handle this N:M diagram is:

However, this limit the use of the pivot attribute account_type.

that said... my question/idea is: Can we improve django-jsonform and consequently django admin itself to handle relation manyToMany better than the actual component "select multiple"? And if yes than how?

[danielcatao]

Perhaps People -> PeopleBanks <- Banks wasn´t a good example, please, think of Product -> OrderProduct <- Order with OrderProduct having product_price attr.

[bhch]

I can see that selecting Client and Bank again and again can get tiresome.

Here's my solution:

1. Instead of sending an empty Accounts array from the server, you send the initial data array with all the Client–Bank combinations as items. This way django-jsonform will display all the items with Client and Bank data pre-filled for you.
2. In the schema, make the Select input readonly.
3. Set array's min_items and max_items to the total items in the list to prevent removing or adding items.
4. Then you will only have to fill the Account type field.

[danielcatao]

I dont know if thats the best way because in a case of 1 milion records it will cost a lot of computing just to give options.

I think that maybe a parser from json scheme onsave to convert to SQL insert would be better.

Maybe can django-jsonform identify that it is being used by a manyToManyField?

Ps: I'm sorry if I am not being clear. I'm coming from PHP and only learned python last week. I will dive into the code and figure out a better propose. I'm sorry for my english too. I'm from Brazil.

[danielcatao]

Perhaps the form can turn into a table too to save some screen space like it is the component Matrix from Laravel Orchid.

[danielcatao]

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/ref/contrib/admin/#working-with-many-to-many-models (admin.TabularInline) did the job..

Thank you for the attention @bhch