😸 Pretty options for Django's auth.User

Python django web

Several of my Django Apps have Foreign Key relationships to django.contrib.auth.model.User. In Django's admin app, these show up a select elements displaying the username attribute. For some people, that may be OK, but for most of the people with which I work, it's not. We want to see prettier options, i.e. each User's full name as the options in that select element.

So, here's how it works. We override the ModelChoiceField (for ForeignKeys) and the ModelMultipleChoiceField (for ManyToMany Fields):

from django.forms import ModelChoiceField, ModelMultipleChoiceField

class UserModelChoiceField(ModelChoiceField):
    ''' 
    A ModelChoiceField to represent User 
    select boxes in the Auto Admin 
    '''
    def label_from_instance(self, obj):
        return "%s (%s)"%(obj.get_full_name(), obj.username)

class UserModelMultipleChoiceField(ModelMultipleChoiceField):
    ''' 
    Similar to UserModelChoiceField, provide a nicer-looking 
    list of user names for ManyToMany Relations...
    '''
    def label_from_instance(self, obj):
        return "%s (%s)"%(obj.get_full_name(), obj.username)

Then, to customize the admin, you need to create a custome ModelForm for your Model. So, if I had a Model that looked like this:

class MyModel(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)

You'd need to create the following ModelForm:

class MyModelAdminForm(forms.ModelForm):
    user = UserModelChoiceField(User.objects.all().order_by('first_name', 'last_name', 'username'))

    class Meta:
        model = MyModel

Now, when you create a ModelAdmin class for the MyModel, you specify the above form:

from models import MyModel
from forms import MyModelAdminForm

class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = MyModelAdminForm
admin.site.register(MyModel, MyModelAdmin)

At this point, the choices for User objects in the admin should contain the user's full name and their username in parenthesis.

Pretty options for Django's auth.User

Published on April 22, 2010, 9:07 a.m.