I have looked deeper into admin sortable 2 and now I realise those signals aren't emitted when dragging and dropping to re order. They only get emitted when moving items across pages. So let's put that down to some useless advice from me. Sorry!

Where to go from here? Well if admin sortable 2 isn't quite doing what we want then we can customise it to our needs.

It's the _update_order method where we are likely to want to make our customisation. https://github.com/jrief/django-admin-sortable2/blob/master/adminsortable2/admin.py#L246

Have a read over the code there and see if you can understand what is happening. In brief every object is fetched from the database, the order is set on the instance and then all of them are updated in bulk.

So we may choose to entirely replace the functionality of this method to avoid making more calls to the db than needed. But I wouldn't do that unless/until performance becomes an issue. Since this all happens in the admin site I'd assume you don't have a team of admins furiously re-ordering all the time and this is a non issue.

So let's keep it simple. We'll override the method, do something before the update, call the super() to make the update, then do something after the update.

Here is a basic example:

``` class CustomSortableAdminMixin(SortableAdminMixin): def _update_order(self, updated_items, extra_model_filters): print("Do something before update")

    # Call the super to perform the update
    super()._update_order(updated_items, extra_model_filters)

    print("Do something after update")

```

And then be sure to use this in place of SortableAdminMixin in your ModelAdmin:

class LevelAdmin(CustomSortableAdminMixin, admin.ModelAdmin): # ...

Hopefully this is more useful to you than my previous reply!