Why

Django-editlive came from a pragmatical need. Forms are great, but their workflow aren't always practical in the context of a web application.

With django-editlive users can edit model fields with minimum efforts without reloading the page.

This project is largely inspired by the django-inplaceeditform project, but has some fundamental differences in term of implementation.

How

• Make any object field editable with a simple editlive template tag
• Standard form validation is used to validate input
• Ships with basic jQuery UI widgets (like datepicker)
• But you can easily extend it and create your own UI widgets
• Has a JavaScript API
• Ships with a bootstrap theme
• Use django-dajaxice for ajax communications
• Documented with Read the Docs
• Tested on Travis CI with Selenium, lettuce and splinter

{%load editlive_tags%}
{%editlive "object.date_test" as field%}
<div>
    <label>Date:</label>
    {{field}}
</div>

Benefits

Performance is certainly not a benefit, at least on the server side.

But for user it makes the editing a lot faster and concurrency safe.

When submiting a standard form, every fields gets written back to the database, even if they haven't changed. This can lead to concurrency problem and data loss if two users edit and save the same form at the same time.

Django-editlive saves only the edited field, reducing considerably the chances of concurrent saves conflicts.

Limitations

This concept is only good for editing, standard forms should be used to create new objects.

This project is not mature yet, which means it is not optimized for performances and still lack some basic feature.

It is not currently possible to instanciate two editlive for the same object field.

If you wish to report an issue or submit a feature request, please use the project's github issue tracker.

Roadmap

Aside from bug fixing and better documentation, the long term objectives and ideas are the following:

• More widgets
• JavaScript input format restriction
• Live create forms
• Event based sync using persistant connection