Edited :-) Hopefully a bit clearer now. The logic is of the model is: A Building has many Rooms A Room may be inside another Room (a closet, for instance--ForeignKey on 'self') A Room can only in inside of another Room in the same building (this is the tricky part) Here's the code I have: #spaces/models.py from django.db import models class Building(models.Model): name=models.CharField(max_length=32) def __unicode__(self): return self.name class Room(models.Model): number=models.CharField(max_length=8) building=models.ForeignKey(Building) inside_room=models.ForeignKey('self',blank=True,null=True) def __unicode__(self): return self.number and: #spaces/admin.py from ex.spaces.models import Building, Room from django.contrib import admin class RoomAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin): pass class RoomInline(admin.TabularInline): model = Room extra = 2 class BuildingAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin): inlines=[RoomInline] admin.site.register(Building, BuildingAdmin) admin.site.register(Room) The inline will display only rooms in the current building (which is what I want). The problem, though, is that for the inside_room drop down, it displays all of the rooms in the Rooms table (including those in other buildings). In the inline of rooms, I need to limit the inside_room choices to only rooms which are in the current building being displayed by the main form. I can't figure out a way to do it with either a limit_choices_to in the model, nor can I figure out how exactly to override the admin's inline formset properly (I feel like I should be somehow create a custom inline form, pass the building_id of the main form to the custom inline, then limit the queryset for the field's choices based on that--but I just can't wrap my head around how to do it). Maybe this is too complex for the admin site, but it seems like something that would be generally useful... Thanks again for your help!