django admin - select reverse foreign key relation

Question

Lets say I have a model School and another model Student.

class Student(models.Model):
   school = models.ForeignKey(School)
   name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

When a school is clicked in admin, then a new page appears showing school model fields and values.

I also want to select the already available list of students in that page itself.

Inlines is different, they will allow the ability to create and edit new records(student) belonging to that school. But I don't want that, lets assume there are already many student records available. I should be able to select them in admin from that school model page.

Answer 1

Do you mean that for a given School instance you want to be able to get a list of all the students related to that school?

In which case you use the related_name attribute of the ForeignKey relationship you specified. You haven't defined the related_name where you do:

school = models.ForeignKey(School)

which is fine, it just uses the default related name which is the name of the child class (student) followed by _set

so for your school instance:

school = School.objects.get(pk=1)
students = school.student_set.all()  # or .filter() or .exclude() etc

then you can pass that student queryset into your template.

Answer 2

class SchoolAdminForm(forms.ModelForm):
    students = forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField(
        queryset=Student.objects.all(),
        widget=FilteredSelectMultiple(verbose_name='students', is_stacked=False))

    class Meta:
        model = School
        fields = ['your_school_fields_go_here']

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(SchoolAdminForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        if self.instance:
            # fill initial related values
            self.fields['students'].initial = self.instance.student_set.all()

class SchoolAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
   form = SchoolAdminForm

   def save_model(self, request, obj, form, change):
       original_students = obj.student_set.all()
       new_students = form.cleaned_data['students']
       remove_qs = original_students.exclude(id__in=new_students.values('id'))
       add_qs = new_students.exclude(id__in=original_students.values('id'))
       for item in remove_qs:
           obj.student_set.remove(item)
       for item in add_qs:
           obj.student_set.add(item)
       obj.save()

Answer 3

You can disable the inline 'add' permission. See InlineModelAdmin