Based on first idea and implementation from Marco Beri and Stefano Brentegani here packaged as a django app with some test cases added

Download the repo:

git clone https://github.com/depaolim/django_smart_raw_id.git

Add this folder to your pythonpath

The app is tested on Django 1.6 and has no dependency from other packages (apart from django itsef)

In your project do the following steps:

1. Add the app smart_raw_id to INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py

2. Use SmartRawIdMixin as a mixin class for your model admin classes

The following is an an example of usage in your admin.py

from smart_raw_id import SmartRawIdMixin

class SingleSaleAdmin(SmartRawIdMixin, ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ('id', 'product', 'price')
    raw_id_fields = ('product', )

To deploy remember to do:

python manage.py collectstatic

To run tests you need selenium as stated by requirements_dev.txt

pip install -r requirements_dev.txt
cd django_smart_raw_id
python manage.py test

LiveServerTestCase and selenium could have timeout problems. In such case you must restart the test