Tying in to Django Admin's Model History

akdom_145 0
Viewed 67515

The Setup:

  • I'm working on a Django application which allows users to create an object in the database and then go back and edit it as much as they desire.
  • Django's admin site keeps a history of the changes made to objects through the admin site.

The Question:

  • How do I hook my application in to the admin site's change history so that I can see the history of changes users make to their "content"?
django-admin django-models django
6 Answers

The admin history is just an app like any other Django app, with the exception being special placement on the admin site.

The model is in django.contrib.admin.models.LogEntry.

When a user makes a change, add to the log like this (stolen shamelessly from contrib/admin/options.py:

from django.utils.encoding import force_unicode
from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
from django.contrib.admin.models import LogEntry, ADDITION
LogEntry.objects.log_action(
    user_id         = request.user.pk, 
    content_type_id = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(object).pk,
    object_id       = object.pk,
    object_repr     = force_unicode(object), 
    action_flag     = ADDITION
)

where object is the object that was changed of course.

Now I see Daniel's answer and agree with him, it is pretty limited.

In my opinion a stronger approach is to use the code from Marty Alchin in his book Pro Django (see Keeping Historical Records starting at page 263). There is an application django-simple-history which implements and extends this approach (docs here).

Van_Gale_342580

The admin's change history log is defined in django.contrib.admin.models, and there's a history_view method in the standard ModelAdmin class.

They're not particularly clever though, and fairly tightly coupled to the admin, so you may be best just using these for ideas and creating your own version for your app.

user_1043490

To add to what's already been said, here are some other resources for you:

(1) I've been working with an app called django-reversion which 'hooks into' the admin history and actually adds to it. If you wanted some sample code that would be a good place to look.

(2) If you decided to roll your own history functionality django provides signals that you could subscribe to to have your app handle, for instance, post_save for each history object. Your code would run each time a history log entry was saved. Doc: Django signals

user_1113750

Example code:

from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType  
from django.contrib.admin.models import LogEntry, ADDITION  

LogEntry.objects.log_action(
    user_id=request.user.pk,
    content_type_id=ContentType.objects.get_for_model(object).pk,
    object_id=object.pk,
    object_repr=str(object),
    action_flag=ADDITION,
)

Object is the object you want to register in the admin site log.
You can try with str() class in the parameter object_repr.

user_147277480
Related