🌟 Beanie ODM Support for starlette-admin – Work in Progress

[arnabJ]

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm currently working on a Python package that enables Beanie ODM as a backend for starlette-admin. While starlette-admin already supports several ORMs/ODMs out of the box (like SQLAlchemy, Odmantic, etc.), Beanie isn't officially supported yet.

Following the official guide on creating a custom backend and using Odmantic’s implementation as a reference, I've started building a reusable package that bridges the gap between starlette-admin and Beanie.

🔧 Current Status: Work-in-progress
🌱 Branch: dev
💬 Feedback/PRs Welcome On: dev-colab

🔗 Repository
👉 GitHub Repo

🧪 Goals

• Provide a seamless integration of Beanie models into the admin panel.
• Handle common field types and filters.
• Allow community collaboration before a stable release to PyPI.

If anyone’s already attempted this, or has insights, I'd love your feedback! PRs and ideas are welcome on the dev-colab branch.

Thanks to the maintainers for the extensibility guide — it made this much easier to get started. 🙌

[alexdlukens]

Hello! 😄

Was working on this a bit for my own project on my fork here. I didn't see the work you did on your branch under "initial commit" until I was pretty deep into my logic 😦

I was able to get the models to show up, sort, and filter as you would expect. Nested pydantic model fields should work using the converter for "BaseModel". Tested the sorting and filtering on string fields for now. Links and list of links are working on my branch as you would expect. Didn't work on BackLinks yet, as this is more complex (no id to reference in the BackLink itself).

I build the MongoDB filter queries using the logic from the mongoengine interface, adapted to work with pymongo. I'm sure some complex models will break the logic.

To get my fork working with your FastAPI app:

Install

pip install "git+https://github.com/alexdlukens/starlette-admin.git@beanie"
# or
poetry add "git+https://github.com/alexdlukens/starlette-admin.git@beanie"

In your code

from starlette_admin.contrib.beanie import Admin, ModelView

admin = Admin()
... call init_beanie() ...

# for each document model you pass to init_beanie
for model in models:
    admin.add_view(ModelView(model, name=model.__name__))
admin.mount_to(app)

Will try to merge the codebases if I get a chance. Looks like you have more work on the field sorting that I should add to my code.

Also haven't added all of the pydantic types one may encounter into the converter, so will fail for some complex models

At any rate, hope this helps for your case. Please give it a try and let me know if you have success

edit: got some initial tests, copied from mongoengine to work. But having issues getting mypy to pass, because beanie requires Pydantic v2.x. mypy fails when checking on pydantic v1.10.x

Best,

[arnabJ]

First of all thanks for taking your time to share this here.

I think it could be a good thing in a way that 2 of us are working on this. We can then try to merge our code base into one by picking parts from each one's strong suits.

I am also working on the Filtering logic and I successfully tested equals & contains filters.

The reason why I decided to build this as a separate plugin instead of forking the main starlette-admin package was to have a sort of independency in releasing bug fixes, new feature and/or performance improvements.

[arnabJ]

@alexdlukens I have pushed an update with Filters and search working.
The find_by_pks and delete functions have been fixed too.

I tested a few filters such as contains, startswith, endswith, not_starstwith, equals.

[arnabJ]

A new commit is now up. It adds the filters option and also allows using the search bar.
I have also fixed the delete function not working.

Next thing I will be working on is OrderBy for the list page.

[jowilf]

@arnabJ, thank you for starting this initiative. I just approved @alexdlukens's pull request #656 to officially support this. You can also take a quick look before it gets merged.

[arnabJ]

@jowilf mention not.

Thanks for the information. I will surely take a look. I will also keep working on my package just for practice.

@alexdlukens congratulations and thank you a lot for making this.

[arnabJ]

@jowilf @alexdlukens The Beanie ModelView seems to not have support for before_edit and after_edit and similarly for create and delete.

Are these something to be added in future or was they missed?

[alexdlukens]

Hi @arnabJ, I did not need to put any logic in those methods, so they are defaulted/empty as in the Base class here.

If you want to add something to these methods you can make a subclass from the Beanie ModelView and define the logic there.

[jowilf]

good catch @arnabJ. I missed that in my review. @alexdlukens you forgot to call the hook in your function. For example

starlette-admin/starlette_admin/contrib/odmantic/view.py

Line 138 in c9a7b33

await self.before_create(request, data, obj)

[arnabJ]

Hi @arnabJ, I did not need to put any logic in those methods, so they are defaulted/empty as in the Base class here.

If you want to add something to these methods you can make a subclass from the Beanie ModelView and define the logic there.

@alexdlukens I am refering to this file: starlette_admin/contrib/beanie/view.py

As @jowilf mentioned, they are missing. For reference, this is the edit function in Odmantic's ModelView:

async def edit(self, request: Request, pk: Any, data: Dict[str, Any]) -> Any:
        session: Union[AIOSession, SyncSession] = request.state.session
        data = await self._arrange_data(request, data, is_edit=True)
        try:
            obj = await self.find_by_pk(request, pk)
            obj.update(data)
            await self.before_edit(request, data, obj)  # <-- Check this
            if isinstance(session, AIOSession):
                obj = await session.save(obj)
            else:
                obj = await anyio.to_thread.run_sync(session.save, obj)
            await self.after_edit(request, obj)  # <-- Check this
            return obj
        except Exception as e:
            self.handle_exception(e)

[arnabJ]

@jowilf I am not sure if I should create an issue or not for this, but to keep everything related to beanie at one place:

This is my Beanie Model:

class PostStatus(str, Enum):
    draft = "Draft"
    published = "Published"


class Post(BaseDocument):
    title: str = Field(..., description="Title of the post")
    slug: Indexed(str, unique=True) = Field(..., description="Unique slug for the post")
    excerpt: Optional[str] = Field(None, description="Short summary of the post")
    content: Union[str, dict] = Field(..., description="Block-based format content, HTML or JSON")
    thumbnail: str = Field(..., description="Thumbnail URL")
    status: PostStatus = Field(default=PostStatus.draft, description="Post status")

    @before_event(Insert)
    async def insert_slug(self):
        slug = self.title.lower().replace(" ", "_")
        existing_count = await Post.find_many({"slug": slug}).count()
        if existing_count > 0:
            slug = f"{slug}_{existing_count + 1}"
        self.slug = slug

My CustomView:

class PostAdmin(ModelView):
    model = Post

    fields = [
        "id", "title", "slug", "excerpt", TextAreaField("content"), ImageField("thumbnail"), "status"
    ]

    exclude_fields_from_create = ["slug"]
    exclude_fields_from_edit = ["slug"]

    async def create(self, request: Request, data: dict) -> T:
        data["slug"] = ""
        return await super().create(request, data)

But, the TextArea and Image fields are not showing up. They render as text input.

Am I missing something?

[arnabJ]

I added these 2 fields to my Model:

categories: List[Link[Category]]
tags: List[Link[Tag]]

And then updated my View to:
class PostAdmin(ModelView):
model = Post

fields = [
    "id", "title", "slug", "excerpt", TextAreaField("content"), ImageField("thumbnail"),
    HasMany("categories", label="Categories"), HasMany("tags", label="Tags"),
    # "categories", "tags",
    "status", "created_by", "updated_by", "created_at", "updated_at"
]

exclude_fields_from_create = ["slug"]
exclude_fields_from_edit = ["slug"]

async def create(self, request: Request, data: dict) -> T:
    data["slug"] = ""
    return await super().create(request, data)

But these also don't work as expected. The label="Categories" isn't doing anything. I also noticed that the thumbnail, categories and tags table is in all small letters whereas the others are in Title case (1st letter caps and then all small).

[jowilf]

I think the issue is here

starlette-admin/starlette_admin/contrib/beanie/converters.py

Line 118 in c9a7b33

def convert_fields_list(

.

There's no need to convert an already defined field (ex. StringField,...)

[arnabJ]

I think the issue is here

starlette-admin/starlette_admin/contrib/beanie/converters.py

Line 118 in c9a7b33

def convert_fields_list(

.

There's no need to convert an already defined field (ex. StringField,...)

I understand that I don't need to convert an already defined field, but I want it to be a textarea instead of just input.

Also, I need the thumbnail to be an image field. I will be storing the upload path to the db.

On further checks, I have come to the conclusion that no matter what I give in the fields list, they are being ignored. Because the same setup works well with ODMantic. I came to notice this when I added 2 new fields in my model but didn't updated the fields list in the View, it didn't caused any error. The new fields got rendered.

[jowilf]

Yes, I believe you misunderstood me. I was referring to the convert_list code that should not convert a Starlette admin field. Your code is good and should work as you described it. A temporary solution is to provide your own converter and override the convert_list function.Also feel free to summit a PR

[arnabJ]

Okay, I will try to work on this. But, I still believe, it's not just the convert_list function. As I mentioned, the fields list isn't being used at all.

[arnabJ]

@jowilf can you shed some light into this line:

starlette-admin/starlette_admin/contrib/odmantic/view.py

Line 135 in c9a7b33

data = await self._arrange_data(request, data)

The _arrange_data method returns a stripped down dict with only those fields which are not excluded. Is there any particular reason we would wanna do this?

Scenario:
I have a Tag model with a name field and a couple of References to my User Model in created_by and updated_by fields. A logged in user can create a Tag using the Admin Panel. I don't want to show a user selection input in the Create/Edit page. Instead I am manually adding it to the data by overriding the create method:

async def create(self, request: Request, data: dict) -> Any:
    user = await get_admin(request)
    data["created_by"] = user.id
    data["updated_by"] = user.id
    return await super().create(request, data)

Since the created_by field is excluded from showing in the Create page, the _arrange_data method removes my manually added value from the dict.

Input:

input_data = {'name': 'Animation', 'created_by': ObjectId('68400151399d4c0d9175d64f'), 'updated_by': ObjectId('68400151399d4c0d9175d64f')}
outpout_data = self._arrange_data(request, inout_data). # {'name': 'Animation'}

It removed the 2 fields which were excluded and this raises execption:

2 validation errors for Tag
created_by
  Field required [type=missing, input_value={'name': 'Animation'}, input_type=dict]
    For further information visit https://errors.pydantic.dev/2.11/v/missing
updated_by
  Field required [type=missing, input_value={'name': 'Animation'}, input_type=dict]
    For further information visit https://errors.pydantic.dev/2.11/v/missing
INFO:     127.0.0.1:62314 - "POST /admin/tag/create HTTP/1.1" 422 Unprocessable Entity

I am referencing your ODMantic views.py to create my views.py for Beanie.

[jowilf]

The arrange data only load relationships and replace the primary key by the object loaded from the data ase. The default create function only set fields that is defined in the models and not excluded. that's why you need hooks to edit the object before saving into the database. you can simply write you own create method for now until the hooks are fixed

[arnabJ]

I am sorry, I am at a loss here. Do you have any example of such a hook?
I tried modifying the current beanie implementation by @alexdlukens but decided to first work on my implementation so that we can compare and merge parts to fix the conversion issue.

For now, I have just disabled the _arrange_data method call and Create is working as expected with Link (Reference to another model, List of Links, optional fields, excluded fields with manually set data, etc.)

[arnabJ]

Beanie Backend Plugin for Starlette Admin

I've just released a Beanie backend plugin for Starlette Admin:
GitHub: https://github.com/arnabJ/starlette-admin-beanie-backend
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/starlette-admin-beanie-backend/

The goal of this plugin is to provide seamless integration with Beanie ODM, while keeping the implementation as close as possible to the existing Odmantic backend. This approach aims to ensure stability and a familiar experience for users already working with other supported ODMs.

As this is my first attempt at building a backend plugin, I’ve kept the design simple and minimal to reduce the likelihood of introducing errors. However, given my limited experience, I'm not entirely certain whether some of the issues I'm encountering are due to limitations in my plugin or are expected behaviors based on Starlette Admin's current capabilities.

If @jowilf or others familiar with the internals could provide feedback or insights, it would be greatly appreciated.

Known Issues

• List[Link[SomeModel]] fields are not automatically recognized as HasMany Field. These need to be explicitly defined in a custom ModelView.
• Using Indexed() directly on Link fields causes form rendering issues. Instead, indexes for such fields should be declared via the indexes list inside the model's Settings class.

I would be grateful for any testing, feedback, or suggestions from the community to help improve and stabilize this plugin.