Referencing a Django contrib.admin user via a foreign key?

Question

I'm developing a small Django site and I'm using django.contrib.admin to handle content management. I'd like to capture the first name & last name of the author (an Admin user) of an Article on its initial save (and not update it if another user edits the Article).

ie.

class Article(models.Model)
    title = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')
    author = ForeignKey(???)
    ...

What do I need to write to grab this user's first name & last name fields when creating a new Article object? I'd default to their admin username if those fields are blank.

This is a possible duplicate. Doc: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/ — , Feb 27 '11 at 15:08

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

Have your model use the User object:

author = models.ForeignKey(User)

To prevent this field from being changeable on update, check out this other SO post:
Django admin: exclude field on change form only

To change the admin's Select field to use first/last name, you could try this snippet:
http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1642/

To change the admin's view, assuming you are using the built-in templates, you could add a custom column as described on this post: How do I add a custom column with a hyperlink in the django admin interface?

class AuthorAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
list_display = ('author_name',)

def my_author_name(self, obj):
    if obj.author.first_name and obj.author.last_name:
        return '%s %s' % (obj.author.first_name, obj.author.last_name)
    else: 
        return obj.author.username
my_author_name.allow_tags = True
my_author_name.short_description = 'Author'

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 27 '11 at 15:06

1

I think you are looking for this:

author = models.ForeignKey(User)

answered Feb 27 '11 at 15:06

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

It looks like the best way to handle a None or blank result from get_full_name is to just populate User.author with models.ForeignKey(User) and then — at the template level — use the following:

{{ user.get_full_name|default:user.username }}

... via this SO answer. This allows me to perform queries on a User's Articles, but still gracefully handles blank first_name & last_name fields if a User hasn't entered them yet, but will also update dynamically when they have).

Referencing a Django contrib.admin user via a foreign key?

3 Answers3