Question

I want to add few fields to every model in my django application. This time it’s created_at, updated_at and notes. Duplicating code for every of 20+ models seems dumb. So, I decided to use abstract base class which would add these fields. The problem is that fields inherited from abstract base class come first in the field list in admin. Declaring field order for every ModelAdmin class is not an option, it’s even more duplicate code than with manual field declaration.

In my final solution, I modified model constructor to reorder fields in _meta before creating new instance:

class MyModel(models.Model):
    # Service fields
    notes = my_fields.NotesField()
    created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    updated_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

    class Meta:
        abstract = True

    last_fields = ("notes", "created_at", "updated_at")
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        new_order = [f.name for f in self._meta.fields]
        for field in self.last_fields:
            new_order.remove(field)
            new_order.append(field)
        self._meta._field_name_cache.sort(key=lambda x: new_order.index(x.name))
        super(MyModel, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

class ModelA(MyModel):
    field1 = models.CharField()
    field2 = models.CharField()
    #etc ... 

It works as intended, but I’m wondering, is there a better way to acheive my goal?

Answer 1

If you mainly need the ordering for Django’s admin you could also create your “generic”-admin class via sub-classing Django’s admin class. See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial02/#customize-the-admin-form for customizing the display of fields in the admin.
You could overwrite the admin’s __init__ to setup fields/fieldsets on creation of the admin instance as you wish. E.g. you could do something like:

class MyAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def __init__(self, model, admin_site):
        general_fields = ['notes', 'created_at', 'updated_at']
        fields = [f.name for f in self.model._meta.fields if f.name not in general_fields]
        self.fields = fields + general_fields
        super(admin.ModelAdmin, self).__init__(model, admin_site)

Besides that i think it’s not a good practice to modify the (private) _field_name_cache!