Modify a form in the Django admin panel based on the request

November 2, 2017 Tagged: Django, Misc

Sometimes it’s tricky to customize the Django admin site. This particular issue plagued me for a good hour, and I wasn’t able to find a solution online.

If you want to serve the admin forms differently based on the request & object, it’s intuitive to override the get_form method.

@admin.register(Something)
class SomethingAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = SomethingForm
    fields = ('ownery', 'name')

    def get_form(self, request, obj=None, **kwargs):
        form = super(SomethingAdmin, self).get_form(request, obj=obj, **kwargs)
        # Do something here ...
        return form

Let’s say you want to disable the owner field if the object already has an owner. Subclassing forms.ModelForm doesn’t give you access to the form while rendering, so best to do it from the admin. The problem is that get_form, unintuitively, does not return a form but a form factory. So there’s no fields attribute, only base_fields. If you change base_fields, you change every form, which is probably not what you want.

# This has confusing results
def get_form(self, request, obj=None, **kwargs):
    form = super(SomethingAdmin, self).get_form(request, obj=obj, **kwargs)
    form.base_fields['owner'].disabled = obj is not None
    return form

Instead, you want to provide your own factory.

@admin.register(Something)
class SomethingAdmin(admin.SomethingAdmin):
    form = SomethingForm
    # Note that if this attribute is removed the get_form method will fail
    fields = ('owner', 'name')

    def get_form(self, request, obj=None, **kwargs):
        """
        Modify the default factory to change form fields based on the request/object.
        """
        default_factory = super(SomethingAdmin, self).get_form(request, obj=obj, **kwargs)

        def factory(*args, **_kwargs):
            form = default_factory(*args, **_kwargs)
            return self.modify_form(form, request, obj, **_kwargs)

        return factory

    @staticmethod
    def modify_form(form, request, obj, **kwargs):
        """
        Disable the 'owner' field if it already exists.
        """
        form.fields['owner'].disabled = obj is not None and obj.owner is not None
        return form

A mishmash. Algo trading & market making @ sixtant.io. I also practice parkour.

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