Django admin list view show external url data in custom column

Question

we have a list view something like below

Now lets say we want to add one more column in the view which doesn't exist in model. so we can do that by creating a method inside admin class.

class PageAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):

    list_display = ["id", "title", "slug", "author", 'updated', 'custom_field']

    def custom_field(self, obj):
        # logic...
        return True # or False based on above logic

This is simple. Now lets take a more complicated scenario where I need this column to be populated based on the result of goodreads.com search. I mean I'll search objects title on goodreads and find the exact title if found then will return True else False.

For e.g there is a page object and title of this is hunger games so when I search this, I'll get https://www.goodreads.com/search?query=hunger+games

I'll parse the result and check if exact title exist in top 10 results.

class PageAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):

    list_display = ["id", "title", "slug", "author", 'updated', 'custom_field']

    def custom_field(self, obj):
        # search on goodreads.com, parse results and match with obj.title
        return True # or False based on above logic

The problem with this approach is that it makes admin page very slow.. since it will get data for all objects in a page(normally 100 objects)

How can I improve this? is there any asynchronous way to do this without changing much html/css/js. how can I use changelist_view method in admin class for my use case

PS: I would also like to consider bulk search approach in case if it is a different domain. I mean instead of hitting search api 100 times, I'll hit only once and pass all object's title(comma separated). https://api.goodreads.com/search?query=title1,title2,title3...

assuming this will return only exact matching books and based on id I can show True or False on admin page

PPS: I can't add another column in db table, if external service is down or taking too long to respond, I'll show some relevant message.

user_2881463 · Answer

class OrderAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):

    list_display = ["id", "title", "slug", "author", 'updated', 'custom_field']

    def custom_field(self, obj):
        return obj.title in self.found_in_goodreads

    def get_paginator(self, *args, **kwargs):
        paginator = super().get_paginator(*args, **kwargs)
        request, queryset, count = args
        page = int(request.GET.get('p', 1))  #  For current page only
        titles = paginator.page(page).object_list.values_list('title', flat=True)

        # search_goodreads
        # url = "https://api.goodreads.com/search?query={}".format(''.join(titles))
        # response = requests.get(url)
        # parse the response and store titles in the list
        # self.found_in_goodreads = [title for titles in response]
        return paginator

Additionally, you must handle cases when goodreads server is down, returning 400, timeout etc.

Django admin list view show external url data in custom column

1 Answers