Doing this properly requires two steps:
- Hide the edit link, so nobody stumbles on the detail page (change view) by mistake.
- Modify the change view to redirect back to the list view.
The second part is important: if you don't do this then people will still be able to access the change view by entering a URL directly (which presumably you don't want). This is closely related to what OWASP term an "Insecure Direct Object Reference".
As part of this answer I'll build a ReadOnlyMixin class that can be used to provide all the functionality shown.
Hiding the Edit Link
Django 1.7 makes this really easy: you just set list_display_links to None.
class ReadOnlyMixin(): # Add inheritance from "object" if using Python 2
list_display_links = None
Django 1.6 (and presumably earlier) don't make this so simple. Quite a lot of answers to this question have suggested overriding __init__ in order to set list_display_links after the object has been constructed, but this makes it harder to reuse (we can only override the constructor once).
I think a better option is to override Django's get_list_display_links method as follows:
def get_list_display_links(self, request, list_display):
"""
Return a sequence containing the fields to be displayed as links
on the changelist. The list_display parameter is the list of fields
returned by get_list_display().
We override Django's default implementation to specify no links unless
these are explicitly set.
"""
if self.list_display_links or not list_display:
return self.list_display_links
else:
return (None,)
This makes our mixin easy to use: it hides the edit link by default but allows us to add it back in if required for a particular admin view.
Redirecting to the List View
We can change the behaviour of the detail page (change view) by overriding the change_view method. Here's an extension to the technique suggested by Chris Pratt which automatically finds the right page:
enable_change_view = False
def change_view(self, request, object_id, form_url='', extra_context=None):
"""
The 'change' admin view for this model.
We override this to redirect back to the changelist unless the view is
specifically enabled by the "enable_change_view" property.
"""
if self.enable_change_view:
return super(ReportMixin, self).change_view(
request,
object_id,
form_url,
extra_context
)
else:
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
opts = self.model._meta
url = reverse('admin:{app}_{model}_changelist'.format(
app=opts.app_label,
model=opts.model_name,
))
return HttpResponseRedirect(url)
Again this is customisable - by toggling enable_change_view to True you can switch the details page back on.
Removing the "Add ITEM" Button
Finally, you might want to override the following methods in order to prevent people adding or deleting new items.
def has_add_permission(self, request):
return False
def has_delete_permission(self, request, obj=None):
return False
These changes will:
- disable the "Add item" button
- prevent people directly adding items by appending
/add to the URL
- prevent bulk delete
Finally you can remove the "Delete selected items" action by modifying the actions parameter.
Putting it all together
Here's the completed mixin:
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
class ReadOnlyMixin(): # Add inheritance from "object" if using Python 2
actions = None
enable_change_view = False
def get_list_display_links(self, request, list_display):
"""
Return a sequence containing the fields to be displayed as links
on the changelist. The list_display parameter is the list of fields
returned by get_list_display().
We override Django's default implementation to specify no links unless
these are explicitly set.
"""
if self.list_display_links or not list_display:
return self.list_display_links
else:
return (None,)
def change_view(self, request, object_id, form_url='', extra_context=None):
"""
The 'change' admin view for this model.
We override this to redirect back to the changelist unless the view is
specifically enabled by the "enable_change_view" property.
"""
if self.enable_change_view:
return super(ReportMixin, self).change_view(
request,
object_id,
form_url,
extra_context
)
else:
opts = self.model._meta
url = reverse('admin:{app}_{model}_changelist'.format(
app=opts.app_label,
model=opts.model_name,
))
return HttpResponseRedirect(url)
def has_add_permission(self, request):
return False
def has_delete_permission(self, request, obj=None):
return False
