Django Admin: Using a custom widget for only one model field

Question

I have a DateTimeField field in my model. I wanted to display it as a checkbox widget in the Django admin site. To do this, I created a custom form widget. However, I do not know how to use my custom widget for only this one field.

The Django documentation explains how to use a custom widget for all fields of a certain type:

class StopAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):     formfield_overrides = {         models.DateTimeField: {'widget': ApproveStopWidget }     } 

This is not granular enough though. I want to change it for only one field.

Answer 1

Create a custom ModelForm for your ModelAdmin and add 'widgets' to its Meta class, like so:

class StopAdminForm(forms.ModelForm):   class Meta:     model = Stop     widgets = {       'approve_ts': ApproveStopWidget(),     }     fields = '__all__'  class StopAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):   form = StopAdminForm 

Done!

Documentation for this is sort of non-intuitively placed in the ModelForm docs, without any mention to it given in the admin docs. See: Creating forms from models

Answer 2

After digging into the admin, model field and form field code, I believe the only way to carry out what I want is by creating a custom model field:

models.py

from django.db import models from widgets import ApproveStopWidget  class ApproveStopModelField(models.DateTimeField):     pass  class Stop(models.model):     # Other fields     approve_ts = ApproveStopModelField('Approve place', null=True, blank=True) 

admin.py

from widgets import ApproveStopWidget from models import ApproveStopModelField  class StopAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):     formfield_overrides = {         ApproveStopModelField: {'widget': ApproveStopWidget }     } 

It gets the job done.

For the time being, I'll leave the question unanswered because I have the habit of missing the obvious. Perhaps some Django smartypants has a better solution.