Admin actions in a changelist from search don't work

[smeyfroi]

This is complicated to explain, but worth having documented somewhere for the next person.

I have a reasonably complex project built on nonrel/GAE that uses the admin screens quite a bit. There are some constraints in what's possible since the built-in admin logic assumes an underlying relational database. But it's definitely possible to get something quite functional working.

However, there's a problem with executing an 'admin action' (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/contrib/admin/actions/) against selected entitities in a change list that's the result of a search. Searches can be made to work with the appropriate dbindexer setup, but there's a weird bit of logic in the vanilla-django code that creates a queryset of selected entities from the search results that causes problems.

The first set of problems comes from djangotoolbox.db.basecompiler.EMULATED_OPS, where the emulated operations don't handle operations against dbindexer list columns. You can get round that like this (or on one line probably):

def _list_starts_with(l, s):
return reduce(lambda result, item: result or item.startswith(s), l)

...
'startswith': lambda x, y: _list_starts_with(x, y) if isinstance(x, (list,tuple)) else x.startswith(y),
...

But then you get an error later on when the action tries to do query set.update. It's complicated and I don't have a fix so there's no point discussing.

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that you probably can't do "admin actions" using nonrel if you enable searching a changelist, unless you'rre prepared to do some changes to vanilla django somewhere along the way... I don't suppose it should be very complicated since the selected entities could be specified with a list of IDs, but that isn't what's going on: that list of IDs is somehow overlaid on a query set that is related to the search you've done. Dunno why. Seems a bit weird to me. Anyway. For info.

Steve