Question

I need group columns in django admin for given db table. I will take sample table ‘Student’ which has columns id, first_name, last_name, address1, address2, address3. So grouping will be like this:

ID -> id

NAME -> first_name, last_name

ADDRESS -> address1, address2, address3

The purpose of this to get label for set of columns when I view rows of data from a table. So When I check for the rows fetched for Student table in Django’s admin section I should see something like this:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| ID   | NAME                   | ADDRESS                                       |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| ID   | First Name | Last Name | Address 1       | Address 2       | Address 3 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 1    | Ron        | DCunha    | 1st Cross       | Valencia        | Mangalore |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| 2    | Akash      | Attavar   | Mark Street     | Attavar         | Mangalore |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I must be able achieve this in admins.py (by writing a class that extends admin.ModelAdmin).Using list_display tuple I can list out the columns that I want to see. But I do not know how to group columns. Please help me out …

Answer 1

To do this, you simply create a method on your Model or ModelAdmin that returns the appropriate display you want, and then use that method name in your list_display (it takes field names or callables).

class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    ...
    list_display = ('id', 'full_name')

    ...

    def full_name(self, obj):
        return u'%s %s' % (obj.first_name, obj.last_name)

OR in your Model (better if the display is useful in other scenarios than the admin, otherwise use ModelAdmin):

class MyModel(models.Model):
    ...
    def get_full_name(self):
        return u'%s %s' % (self.first_name, self.last_name)

class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    ...
    list_display = ('id', 'get_full_name')

If you want it to be orderable, you need to define admin_order_field on the method, but you’ll have to pick one field to use for the ordering:

def full_name(self, obj):
    return u'%s %s' % (obj.first_name, obj.last_name)
full_name.admin_order_field = 'last_name'

If you need to include HTML, specify allow_tags=True on the method:

def full_name(self, obj):
    return u'%s %s' % (obj.first_name, obj.last_name)
full_name.allow_tags = True

Finally, Django will compose the label automatically from the method name; in this case, it would end up being “Full name”. If you want something different you can use short_description:

def full_name(self, obj):
    return u'%s %s' % (obj.first_name, obj.last_name)
full_name.short_description = "User's Full Name"