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Introduction

At #767, I talked about building a RedisCLI view like in the Flask Admin.

I started building this view, but I realized that routing in the view is a bit different from the Flask Admin.

Flask Admin uses one Blueprint (Router equivalent in Flask) per view but SQLAdmin registers exposed methods directly to the main Starlette application instance (BaseAdmin.admin), not a dedicated Router instance of the view.

So in my case, if I do this:

from sqladmin import BaseView, expose

class RedisCLIView(BaseView):
    name = "Redis CLI"
    redis_instance = None
    identity = "rediscli"

    @expose("/rediscli", methods=["GET", "POST"], identity="index")
    async def index_page(self, request):
        # Do something with redis_instance
        return await self.templates.TemplateResponse(request, "sqladmin/redis/index.html")

admin.add_view(RedisCLIView)

The url_for method won't work as expected.

url_for("admin:rediscli:index") will raise an error because the view is not registered as a Router with a name ("rediscli") and the exposed method is not registered as a Route with a name ("index").

url_for("admin:index") will work because exposed methods are registered as a Route to the main Starlette application instance.

What is the problem?

In general, every view is expected to have an entry point (like a home page) and other pages. This is generally the index and other pages.

What happens if we have multiple views with the same entry point name?

from starlette.applications import Starlette
from sqladmin import Admin, BaseView, expose

class RedisCLIView(BaseView):
    name = "Redis CLI"
    redis_instance = None
    identity = "rediscli"

    @expose("/rediscli", methods=["GET", "POST"], identity="index")
    async def index_page(self, request):
        # Do something with redis_instance
        return await self.templates.TemplateResponse(request, "sqladmin/redis/index.html")

class RedisCLI1(RedisCLIView):
    name = "Redis CLI 1"
    redis_instance = None

class RedisCLI2(RedisCLIView):
    name = "Redis CLI 2"
    redis_instance = None

app = Starlette()
admin = Admin(app)
admin.add_view(RedisCLI1)
admin.add_view(RedisCLI2)

Even though RedisCLI1 and RedisCLI2 are different views, they both have the same entry point (index) with the same URL (/rediscli).

Thinking RedisCLIView comes from SQLAdmin, will cause unexpected behavior because the index method is already registered.

Describe the solution you would like.

Solution

Every view should have its own Router and its exposed methods should be registered to that Router.

Describe alternatives you considered

I'm actively using Starlette Admin, it doesn't have a built-in expose method and it has a similar structure to SQLAdmin. The problem that exists here also exists there.

I tried to adopt Flask Admin to work with Starlette but that's not an easy job 😆.

Additional context

Other Problems

Since the index, list, details, delete, create, edit, export, and ajax_lookup endpoints are registered directly to the main Starlette application instance, we can't override them for each view.

The user might need to override the list method in the ModelView but might require different logic per model. So the user must override Admin directly.