Admin Interface for Flask Apps

Many applications require an interface that provides special privileges to some users and can be used to maintain and upgrade an application's resources. For example, we can have an interface in an e-commerce application that will allow some special users to create categories, products, and more. Some users might have permissions to handle other users who shop on the website, deal with their account information, and so on. Similarly, there can be many cases where we will need to isolate some parts of the interface of our application from normal users.

In comparison to the very popular Python-based web framework, Django, Flask does not provide any admin interface by default. Although this can be seen as a shortcoming by many, this gives developers the flexibility to create the admin interface as per their requirements and have complete control...

Creating a simple CRUD interface

CRUD refers to Create, Read, Update, and Delete. A basic necessity of an admin interface is to have the ability to create, modify, or delete the records/resources from the application as and when needed. We will create a simple admin interface that will allow admin users to perform these operations on the records that other normal users generally can't.

Getting ready

We will start with our authentication application from the Authenticating using the Flask-Login extension recipe in Chapter 6, Authenticating in Flask, and add admin authentication and an interface for admins to this, to allow only the admin users to create, update, and delete user records. Here, in this recipe, I will cover...

Using the Flask-Admin extension

Flask-Admin is an available extension that helps in the creation of admin interfaces for our application in a simpler and faster way. All the subsequent recipes in this chapter will focus on using and extending this extension.

Getting ready

First, we need to install the Flask-Admin extension:

    $ pip3 install Flask-Admin 

We will extend our application from the previous recipe and keep building on this.

How to do it...

Adding a simple admin interface to any Flask application using the Flask-Admin extension is just a matter of a couple...

Registering models with Flask-Admin

In the previous recipe, we learned how to get started with the Flask-Admin extension to create admin interfaces/views for our application. In this recipe, we will examine how to implement admin views for our existing models with the facilities to perform CRUD operations.

Getting ready

We will extend our application from the previous recipe to include an admin interface for the User model.

How to do it...

Again, with Flask-Admin, registering a model with the admin interface is very easy; perform the following steps:

1. Just add the following...

Creating custom forms and actions

In this recipe, we will create custom forms using the forms provided by Flask-Admin. Additionally, we will create a custom action using the custom form.

Getting ready

In the previous recipe, we saw that the edit form view for the User record update had no option to update the password for the user. The form looked like the following screenshot:

In this recipe, we will customize this form to allow administrators to update the password for any user.

How to do it...

The implementation of this feature will only require changes to views.py...

Using a WYSIWYG editor for textarea integration

As users of websites, we all know that writing beautiful formatted text using the normal textarea fields is a nightmare. There are plugins that make our life easier and turn simple textarea fields into WYSIWYG editors. One such editor is CKEditor. It is open source, provides good flexibility, and has a huge community for support. Additionally, it is customizable and allows users to build add-ons as needed. In this recipe, we will understand how CKEditor can be leveraged to build beautiful textarea fields.

Getting ready

We start by adding a new textarea field to our User model for notes, and then integrating this field with CKEditor to write formatted text. This will include the...

Creating user roles

So far, we have discovered how a view that is accessible to a certain set of admin users can be created easily using the is_accessible() method. This can be extended to have different kinds of scenarios, where specific users will be able to view specific views. There is another way of implementing user roles at a much more granular level in a model, where the roles determine whether a user can perform all, some, or any of the CRUD operations.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will explore a basic way of creating user roles, where an admin user can only perform actions they are entitled to.

Remember that this is just one way of implementing user roles. There are a number of better ways of doing this, but...