Customizing the Admin

Part of the Models and the Admin section of Coddy's Django journey. Lesson 21 of 23.

The admin's list of books has one column, each book's __str__, and no way to find anything. A ModelAdmin class, registered with the decorator, changes that. For a Loan with a ForeignKey book:

@admin.register(Loan)
class LoanAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ["book", "friend", "lent_on", "returned"]
    search_fields = ["friend", "book__title"]
    list_filter = ["returned", "lent_on"]

list_display picks the columns; a ForeignKey column shows the related row's __str__, and a many-to-many field cannot be a column. search_fields adds a search box. To search through a ForeignKey, name a field of the other model after two underscores, book__title: book alone is a link, not text, and crashes the search. list_filter adds a sidebar of filters.

The decorator does the same as admin.site.register(Loan, LoanAdmin). Register each model once: a second time stops the site with AlreadyRegistered.

Challenge

Easy

In books/admin.py, give Book a BookAdmin in place of its plain registration. The Books list should have:

columns for title, author, year, genre and is_read
a search box that finds books by title or by author's name
a sidebar that filters by genre and is_read

Press Run, log in again and search for herbert.

Try it yourself

from django.contrib import admin

from .models import Author, Book, Tag

admin.site.register(Book)
admin.site.register(Author)
admin.site.register(Tag)