Customize (override) Flask-Admin's Submit method from edit view

Question

Preconditions:
I'm new to Python and to Flask-Admin in particular. I created a simple test service, which has MondoDB, keeping the data with relationship of 'one-to-one' kind.

employeeName -> salary

The model looks like that:

class Employee(db.Document):
    fullName = db.StringField(max_length=160, unique=True)
    salary = db.IntField()

And I use Flask-Admin to observe the table with the data and to edit it. When I want to change the 'salary' field, I just press the 'edit' button and in Flask-Admin's default edit view I change the integer value. I press 'Submit' and a new value in the database is successfully applied.

Question:
But I need to override the Submit method in the way, that leaves as it is the functionality and adds some custom code. Like let's assume I want to add a comment in the log file after an actual db submit:

logging.warning('The salary of %s: was changed to /%s', fullName, salary)

Any suggestion on how to achieve that would be much appreciated. Perhaps you could direct me in the way to go, since the Flask-Admin documentation doesn't give me enough help so far.

Dolly

Answer 1

You can override on_model_change method to add your custom logic. Check http://flask-admin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/mod_model/#flask.ext.admin.model.BaseModelView.on_model_change

Kaph

Didn't have time to respond earlier. Thanks a lot, Joes. Also for your habr article on Flask-Admin, it's helpful :) – Dolly

Address slightly changed: flask-admin.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/mod_model/… -- here the anchor to on_model_change works. – Lilytrotter

Answer 2

I ended up overriding a save method in my Document-derived class. So now my Employee class contains this kind of code:

def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
    print 'whatever I want to do myself is here'
    return super(Employee, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

Today I found that this solution is actually nothing new and is described on StackOverflow.

But for my specific case I think Joes' answer is better. I like it more, because if I override on_model_change I invoke my custom code only if I edit database through Admin webpage; and each programmatic operation over database (like save, update) will work using native code - which is exactly what I want. If I override save method, I will be handling every save operation myself, whether It was initiated by Admin area or programmatically by the server engine.

Solved, thank you!

Dolly