Question

I have the following django model:

class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length = 200)
    body = models.TextField()
    created_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

I also have the following django admin class:

class ArticleAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    fields = ['title', 'body']
    readonly_fields = ['created_date']
    list_display = ['title', 'body', 'created_date']

In the django admin app I can see the created_date field in my Article list:

But for the life of me I can’t get the created_date field to render (as a read only field) when I open an Article:

I got the impression from the docs and from googling around that adding Article’s created_date field to readonly_fields would allow this to happen even if I had set auto_now_add to True on a DateTimeField.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here?

I’m using django 1.4.2.

Answer 1

If you’ve specified fields, you need to add the field to fields.

however, when you specify ModelAdmin.fields or ModelAdmin.fieldsets the read-only fields must be present to be shown (they are ignored otherwise).

The auto_now magic has gotten me a few times.