ADR 0037 — Autocomplete fields are built on django-tomselect

Status: accepted

Decision

Every searchable field in FairDM that chooses a record is a django-tomselect field backed by a view in fairdm.contrib.autocomplete, drawn by django-mvp-forms. FairDM does not use django-autocomplete-light, django-select2 or django-addanother, and a new field does not bring one of them back. The Django admin uses its own autocomplete_fields. Vocabulary concepts are the exception until django-controlled-vocabularies provides a concept field: they use django-mvp-forms’ TomSelectMultiple, which needs no view.

Where django-tomselect or django-mvp-forms falls short, FairDM keeps the smallest override in fairdm/templates/django_tomselect/ and tracks it in #554, rather than bringing in a second library.

Why

FairDM drew searchable selects with three libraries at once. None filtered by visibility, several had stopped rendering, and two asked for addresses that no longer existed. One library styled by django-mvp-forms gives every portal the same control, with the same groups, counts and look, and one place to fix it.

Revisit if

django-tomselect stops being maintained, or django-mvp-forms drops its support for it.