Django Admin: How to access the request object in admin.py, for list_display methods?

Question

I've added a method 'highlight_link' to my model's admin.py class:

class RadioGridAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):

    list_display = ('start_time', highlight_link)

    def highlight_link(self):
     return ('some custom link')


admin.site.register(RadioGrid, RadioGridAdmin)

It returns a custom link for (I've left out highlight_link.short_description for brevity) each record returned in the change list. Which is great. But I'd like to inspect the current query string and change the custom link based on that. Is there a way to access the Request object within 'highlight_link'?

Answer 1

The is no direct way to accomplish this. I see 2 possible solutions.

• Use a thread locals store to same request object

  from django.utils._threading_local import locals
  
  
  globals = locals()
  
  
  class RadioGridAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def __call__(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        globals['radio_grid_admin_request'] = request
        return super(RadioGridAdmin, self).__call__(request, *args, **kwargs)
  
  
    def highlight_link(self):
        request = globals['radio_grid_admin_request']
        # request.GET processing
        return ('some custom link')
  

• If you are using simple non-threaded Django installation it is possible to save request object just as attribute:

  class RadioGridAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def __call__(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        self.request = request
        return super(RadioGridAdmin, self).__call__(request, *args, **kwargs)
  
  
    def highlight_link(self):
        # self.request.GET processing
        return ('some custom link')
  

Answer 2

class RadioGridAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):

    def highlight_link(self, obj):
        return (self.param)

   def changelist_view(self, request, extra_context=None):
        self.param = request.GET['param']
        return super(RadioGridAdmin,self).changelist_view(request, extra_context=extra_context)

Answer 3

I tried the other answers left here and ran into issues that for me, were getting complex. I played around with def __call__() and came up with the following. This probably isn't the correct way to do this, but it works...

grab the GET variable here (all within class RadioGridAdmin as described above in my initial post):

def __call__(self, request, url):
     global start_date
     start_date = request.GET['param']

     return super(RadioGridAdmin, self).__call__(request, url)

and since it's global, you can now access it here:

def highlight_link(self):
 # access start_date here

Answer 4

What's wrong with this:

def highlight_link(self, request): # access start_date here