Disable link to edit object in django's admin (display list only)?

Question

In Django's admin, I want disable the links provided on the "select item to change" page so that users cannot go anywhere to edit the item. (I am going to limit what the users can do with this list to a set of drop down actions - no actual editing of fields).

I see that Django has the ability to choose which fields display the link, however, I can't see how I can have none of them.

class HitAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ('user','ip','user_agent','hitcount')
    search_fields = ('ip','user_agent')
    date_hierarchy = 'created'
    list_display_links = [] # doesn't work, goes to default

Any ideas how to get my object list without any links to edit?

Answer 1

There isn't a supported way to do this.

Looking at the code, it seems that it automatically sets ModelAdmin.list_display_links to the first element if you don't set it to anything. So the easiest way might be to override the __init__ method in your ModelAdmin subclass to unset that attribute on initialization:

class HitAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ('user','ip','user_agent','hitcount')
    search_fields = ('ip','user_agent')
    date_hierarchy = 'created'

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(HitAdmin, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.list_display_links = []

This appears to work, after a very cursory test. I can't guarantee that it won't break anything elsewhere, or that it won't be broken by future changes to Django, though.

Edit after comment:

No need to patch the source, this would work:

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if self.list_display_links:
            unset_list_display = True
        else:
            unset_list_display = False
        super(HitAdmin, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        if unset_list_display:
            self.list_display_links = []

But I highly doubt any patch would be accepted into Django, since this breaks something that the code explicitly does at the moment.

Answer 2

You could also be ridiculously hacky about it (if you didn't want to fuss with overriding init) and provide a value for the first element that basically looks like this:

</a>My non-linked value<a>

I know, I know, not very pretty, but perhaps less anxiety about breaking something elsewhere since all we're doing is changing markup.

Here's some sample code about how this works:

class HitAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ('user_no_link','ip','user_agent','hitcount')

    def user_no_link(self, obj):
        return u'</a>%s<a>' % obj
    user_no_link.allow_tags = True
    user_no_link.short_description = "user"

Side Note: You could also improve the readability of the output (since you don't want it to be a link) by returning return u'%s' % obj.get_full_name() which might be kinda neat depending on your use case.

Answer 3

In your model admin set:

list_display_links = (None,)

That should do it. (Works in 1.1.1 anyway.)

Answer 4

I wanted a Log viewer as a list only. I got it working like this:

class LogEntryAdmin(ModelAdmin):
    actions = None
    list_display = ('action_time', 'user', 'content_type', 'object_repr', 'change_message')
    search_fields = ['=user__username', ]
    fieldsets = [
        (None, {'fields':()}), 
        ]

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(LogEntryAdmin, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.list_display_links = (None, )

It is kind of a mix between both answers. If you just do "self.list_display_links = ()" it will show the link anyway because the templatetag code (templatetags/admin_list.py) checks again to see if the list is empty.