This demo app shows how to dynamically add column descriptions and properly-capitalized labels from the column COMMENTs in a MySQL database.

The flask_admin.contrib.sqla.ModelView's column_labels and column_descriptions properties are updated inside the __init__ for the TestView class (see views.py#L9).

There is also a slight template tweak which adds question mark icons into the list view column headers, which reveal the column comments upon mouseover (overrides the list_header block from Flask-Admin's templates/bootstrap3/admin/model/list.html).

Because SQLite doesn't seem to support column COMMENTs in SQL, this demo requires a running MySQL server. Copy sample_config.ini to config.ini and adjust the values inside to match your setup before proceeding.

git clone https://github.com/ernstki/flask-admin-column-labels 
cd flask-admin-column-labels

# (optional, create a virtual environment)
virtualenv venv && source venv/bin/activate

# fetch dependencies; add '--user' if not using a virtualenv
pip install -r requirements.txt

# launch app w/ optional port number (default: 5000)
python app.py  # 8080

The CREATE TABLE statement for the test database foobar used in the included app.py looks like this:

CREATE TABLE `test` (
    `id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT COMMENT 'The unique ID for the record',
    `name` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL COMMENT 'The name',
    `description` varchar(200) DEFAULT NULL COMMENT 'A longer description',
    PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
);

The TableComment model assumes a view is present on the server called v_table_comments. This seemed easier to me than using two SQLAlchemy engines or some weird table factory in order to query across two separate databases (schemata) with the SQLAlchemy ORM.

The CREATE VIEW statement looks like this:

CREATE VIEW `v_table_comments` AS
    SELECT 
        `information_schema`.`TABLES`.`TABLE_NAME` AS `table_name`,
        `information_schema`.`TABLES`.`TABLE_COMMENT` AS `comment`
    FROM
        `information_schema`.`TABLES`
    WHERE
        (`information_schema`.`TABLES`.`TABLE_SCHEMA` = DATABASE());

If you define this view this as the root user, it will have SQL SECURITY DEFINER, so all users will be able to access the contents of this view (all metadata for the tables in DATABASE()); think about the security implications of this if you are testing on a "real" MySQL server.

Both of the above statements are included in the included setup.sql script, which you can source from within the mysql client once you've authenticated with the server and done the appropriate USE <database>

The ColumnProperty model has a property called proper_name that will try to properly title-case lower-case table names (joined by underscores), and allows you to override the auto-capitalization by including something like

Proper name: ENCODE ID

anywhere in the column's comment. You can specify an arbitrary list of words that should always be in ALL CAPS at the top of models.py.

Same as Flask-Admin itself: BSD 3-Clause. See LICENSE.