Usage

Assuming that you’ve followed the installations steps, you’re now ready to use this package. It provides a collection of functions to quickly and easily build hyperlinks into the admin.

For example, let say you have a BlogPost model that has a link to an Author model:

class Author(models.Model):
    full_name = models.CharField(max_length=50)

    def __str__(self):  # noqa: D105
        return self.full_name


class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    content = models.TextField()
    author = models.ForeignKey(
        Author,
        on_delete=models.CASCADE,
        related_name="posts",
    )

    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

Now you may want to show the list of posts in the admin, and show their respective authors:

@admin.register(Author)
class AuthorAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ["id", "full_name"]


@admin.register(Post)
class PostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ["id", "title", "author"]
    list_select_related = ["author"]

Without this package, if you want to turn the author column into a link to the author admin page, you may do:

from django.urls import reverse
from django.utils.html import format_html


@admin.register(Post)
class PostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ["id", "title", "_author_link"]
    list_select_related = ["author"]

    @admin.display(label="Author")
    def _author_link(self, post):
        author = post.author
        app_label = author._meta.app_label
        model_name = author._meta.model_name
        url = reverse(f"admin:{app_label}_{model_name}_change")
        return format_html(
             '<a href="{url}">{label}</a>',
            url=url,
            label=str(author)
        )

This quite a bit of boilerplate! You could simplify it and hardcode some pieces, but you may trade-off some robustness.

Here is how it look with django-admin-helpers:

from django_admin_helpers.links import admin_url


@admin.register(Post)
class PostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ["id", "title", "_author_link"]
    list_select_related = ["author"]

    @admin.display(label="Author")
    def _author_link(self, post):
        return admin_url(post.author)

You need to add the method, and it’s pretty explicit what’s happening and where the URL comes from.

Ready to dive in? Check out the next section about the full API or the configuration options available.