Inline models for related data in Django - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Inline models for related data

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple Django admin interface for a bookstore. Each Book can have multiple Authors. You want to manage the authors directly on the book's admin page using inline models.

🎯 Goal: Create Django models for Book and Author with a relationship. Then configure the Django admin to show Author as an inline model on the Book admin page.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Django model called Book with a title field.

Create a Django model called Author with a name field and a foreign key to Book.

Create an inline admin class for Author using TabularInline.

Register the Book model in the admin with the Author inline.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Managing related data like authors for books directly in the admin page saves time and keeps data organized.

💼 Career

Knowing how to use inline models in Django admin is a common task for backend developers working with Django to build admin interfaces.

1

Create the Book and Author models

Create a Django model called Book with a title field as models.CharField(max_length=100). Also create a Django model called Author with a name field as models.CharField(max_length=50) and a foreign key to Book named book with on_delete=models.CASCADE.

Django

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use models.CharField for text fields and models.ForeignKey to link Author to Book.

2

Create an inline admin class for Author

In the Django admin file, import admin and create a class called AuthorInline that inherits from admin.TabularInline. Set its model attribute to Author.

Django

from django.db import models

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    book = models.ForeignKey(Book, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use admin.TabularInline to create a simple inline table for authors.

3

Create a BookAdmin class with AuthorInline

Create a Django admin class called BookAdmin that inherits from admin.ModelAdmin. Add an attribute inlines and set it to a list containing AuthorInline.

Django

from django.db import models
from django.contrib import admin

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    book = models.ForeignKey(Book, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

class AuthorInline(admin.TabularInline):
    model = Author

# Create BookAdmin with inlines
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Set inlines to a list with your inline class inside.

4

Register Book model with BookAdmin

Register the Book model with the Django admin site using admin.site.register(Book, BookAdmin).

Django

from django.db import models
from django.contrib import admin

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    book = models.ForeignKey(Book, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

class AuthorInline(admin.TabularInline):
    model = Author

class BookAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    inlines = [AuthorInline]

# Register Book with BookAdmin
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use admin.site.register to connect your model and admin class.