Ian Lewis

Engineer in Tokyo

Custom Admin Views and Reversing Django Admin URLs

Aug 26, 2009

I recently used the new feature in Django 1.1 for reversing django admin URLs and specifying custom admin views in my project django-lifestream.

django-lifestream has a custom admin view which allows users to update the lifestream manually. The code looks like the following:

class ItemAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display    = ('title', 'date','published')
    exclude         = ['clean_content',]
    list_filter     = ('feed',)
    search_fields   = ('title','clean_content')
    list_per_page   = 20

    model = Item

    def save_model(self, request, obj, form, change):
        obj.clean_content = strip_tags(obj.content)
        obj.save()

    def admin_update_feeds(self, request):
        from lifestream.feeds import update_feeds
        #TODO: Add better error handling
        update_feeds()
        return HttpResponseRedirect(
                reverse("admin:lifestream_item_changelist")
        )

    def get_urls(self):
        from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
        urls = super(ItemAdmin, self).get_urls()
        my_urls = patterns('',
            url(
                r'update_feeds',
                self.admin_site.admin_view(self.admin_update_feeds),
                name='admin_update_feeds',
            ),
        )
        return my_urls + urls

admin.site.register(Item, ItemAdmin)

The key parts are the get_urls function and the admin_update_feeds view. The get_urls method returns the URLs for this admin to which we are adding our custom view. The custom view does the updating of the lifestream feeds and returns the user to the Item model’s changelist view. We get the URL for that view by calling reverse with the pattern <namespace>:<app>*<model>_changelistwhich in our case is admin:lifestream_item_changelist since the Django admin uses the admin namespace.

I created the button for updating the feeds by overriding the default admin template with my own subclassed template. The template like the following:

{% extends "admin/change_list.html" %}
{% load adminmedia admin_list i18n %}

{% block object-tools %}
{% if has_add_permission %}
<ul class="object-tools">
  <li><a href="{% url admin:admin_update_feeds %}">{% blocktrans with cl.opts.verbose_name|escape as name %}Update Items{% endblocktrans %}</a></li>
  <li><a href="add/{% if is_popup %}?_popup=1{% endif %}" class="addlink">{% blocktrans with cl.opts.verbose_name|escape as name %}Add {{ name }}{% endblocktrans %}</a></li>
</ul>
{% endif %}
{% endblock %}

Here I’m getting the URL for my custom admin view with the code {% url admin:admin_update_feeds %}, admin_update_feeds being the name I supplied in the get_urls method above.