Problem with searching in m2m fields in inherited model

[Vitek Pliska]

Models:

class Publishable(models.Model):
    ...
    authors = models.ManyToManyField(Author, verbose_name=_('Authors'))

class Article(Publishable):
    ...

and admin options like these:

class PublishableAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    ...
    search_fields = ('title', 'description', 'slug', 'authors__name', 'authors__slug',)

class ArticleAdmin(PublishableAdmin):
    ...

Now, if we try search articles in admin, got this error:

ProgrammingError at /newman/articles/article/

invalid reference to FROM-clause entry for table "core_publishable"
LINE 1: ...") LEFT OUTER JOIN "core_publishable_authors" ON ("core_publ...
                                                             ^
HINT:  Perhaps you meant to reference the table alias "t3".

[Aymeric Augustin]

Change UI/UX from NULL to False.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Change Easy pickings from NULL to False.

[albertoconnor]

Patch to add a negative test case for bisecting

[albertoconnor]

bisecting showed that the issue was fixed in cf70c96ce08bec8834ada695451cc915f7558dbd.

It isn't clear if there is a regression test in that commit, it is possible another test catches it though.

[albertoconnor]

Since I was unable to find a regression test I added a test in PR: ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/4517.

[Tim Graham]

Please don't close a ticket until the patch is committed.

[Baptiste Mispelon]

I haven't been able to reproduce the initial issue.

I tried with the following models/modeladmins:

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200, default='<name>')
    slug = models.SlugField()

class Publishable(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=50, default='<title>')
    slug = models.SlugField()
    description = models.CharField(max_length=200, default='<description>')
    authors = models.ManyToManyField(Author, verbose_name=('Authors'))

class Article(Publishable):
    pass


class PublishableAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    search_fields = ('authors__name', 'authors__slug',)

class ArticleAdmin(PublishableAdmin):
    pass

(Because the initial report wasn't very clear, I even tried making Publishable an abstract model but that didn't seem to change anything).

With this setup, I would start runserver, navigate to the Article admin and start a search, expecting to see the reported error.
I tried various versions of Django (including all tagged 1.0.X releases since 1.0 was the latest release at the time of the report) but I could never trigger any error while doing a search.

The testcase that's attached earlier in the ticket doesn't actually track this issue. It uses self.assertRaises(Exception) which is too broad and ends up catching an AttributeError on m.list_max_show_all just before that attribute is introduced (which explains why it uncovers cf70c96ce08bec8834ada695451cc915f7558dbd).

Given this and the fact that this ticket has seen very little activity over the years, I'm going to close it.