Usage

To enable extended functionality in your Django admin, your admin class needs to extend ExtendedModelAdmin, like so:

# in app/admin.py

from app.models import Book

from adminextensions import ExtendedModelAdmin
from django.contrib import admin

class BookAdmin(ExtendedModelAdmin):
    pass

admin.site.register(Book, BookAdmin)

Everything else in this documentation will assume that you are using the ExtendedModelAdmin base class.

Extending the Object Tools list

The buttons to the top-right of every Django admin screen are called object tools. django-admin-extensions allows you to easily add new links to the object tools, with out having to extend and override the admin templates:

# in app/admin.py

from app.models import Author

from adminextensions import ExtendedModelAdmin
from django.contrib import admin

class AuthorAdmin(ExtendedModelAdmin):

    object_tools = {
        'add': [...],
        'change': [...],
        'changelist': [...],
    }

admin.site.register(Author, AuthorAdmin)

The 'add', 'change', and 'changelist' lists should be populated with callables. These callables will be called with the template context as their only argument. They should return a string, which will be wrapped in a <li> tag and printed to the screen as an object tool. To duplicate the ‘View on site’ object tool, you could do the following:

def absolute_url(context):
    object = content['original']
    if not hasattr(object, 'get_absolute_url'):
        return ''

    return '<a href="{0}">{1}</a>'.format(
        original.get_absolute_url(), 'View on site')

class AuthorAdmin(ExtendedModelAdmin):

    object_tools = {
        'change': [ absolute_url ],
    }

The most common use case is adding links to related models on the 'change' view. This can be achived using the folloing code:

class AuthorAdmin(ExtendedModelAdmin):
    object_tools = {
        'change': [
            model_search('Find books', Book,
                lambda author: {'book__author__pk': author.pk}),

            model_link('View publisher', Publisher,
                lambda book: author.publisher.pk),
        ]
    }

Here, a link is created to the changelist showing all books written by the current author, and a link is created to the change view of the authors publisher. These make use of the model_search and model_link shortcuts.

valid_lookups

By default, the Django admin does not allow filtering via GET parameters on related models. This is for securiry reasons - filtering on related models is a potentially expensive operation, and a denial of service attack could be constructed by abusing this.

Some times though, these kind of look ups are exatly what we want. valid_lookups is a whitelist of related model lookups that should be allowed by the admin. Use it like this:

class BookAdmin(ExtendedModelAdmin):

    valid_lookups = (
        'author__pk'
    )

This allows for lookups on a Book’s Author’s primary key - and nothing more. You will likely have to add a related fields primary key to this list every time you use model_search in the object_tools.