Adding model-wide help text to a django model's admin form

Question

In my django app, I would like to be able to add customized help text to the admin change form for some of my models. Note I'm not talking about the field specific help_text attribute that I can set on individual fields. For example, at the top of the change form for My_Model in My_App I'd like to be able to add some HTML that says "For additional information about My Model, see http://example.com" in order to provide a link to an internal documentation wiki.

Is there any simple way of accomplishing this, or do I need to create a custom admin form for the model? If so, can you give me an example of how I would do that?

Answer 1

Use the admin's fieldsets:

class MyAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    fieldsets = (
        (None, {
            'fields': ('first', 'second', 'etc'),
            'description': "This is a set of fields group into a fieldset."
        }),
    )
    # Other admin settings go here...

You can have multiple fieldsets in an admin. Each can have its own title (replace the None above with the title). You can also add 'classes': ('collapse',), to a fieldset to have it start out collapsed (the wide class makes the data fields wider, and other class names mean whatever your CSS says they do).

Be careful: the description string is considered safe, so don't put any uncleaned data in there. This is done so you can put markup in there as needed (like your link), however, block formatting (like <ul> lists) will probably look wrong.

Answer 2

Besides the possibility of creating fieldsets with descriptions you can override the admin's template for the change form.

Answer 3

There is a fairly simple, yet underdocumented way of accomplishing this.

Define render_change_form in the Admin class

First, you need to pass extra context to your admin. To do this, you can define a render_change_form function within your admin Class, e.g.:

# admin.py
class CustomAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def render_change_form(self, request, context, *args, **kwargs):
        # here we define a custom template
        self.change_form_template = 'admin/myapp/change_form_help_text.html'
        extra = {
            'help_text': "This is a help message. Good luck filling out the form."
        }

        context.update(extra)
        superclass = super(CustomAdmin, self)
        return superclass.render_change_form(request, context, *args, **kwargs)

Creating a custom template

Next, you need to create that custom template (change_form_help_text.html) and extend the default 'admin/change_form.html'.

# change_form_help_text.html
{% extends 'admin/change_form.html' %}
{% block form_top %} 
{% if help_text %}<p>{{ help_text }}</p>{% endif %}
{% endblock %}

I've chosen to place this template inside templates/admin/myapp/, but this is also flexible.

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More info available at:

http://davidmburke.com/2010/05/24/django-hack-adding-extra-data-to-admin-interface/

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/NewformsHOWTO#Q:HowcanIpassextracontextvariablesintomyaddandchangeviews