Django: How to get current user in admin forms?

Question

In Django's ModelAdmin, I need to display forms customized according to the permissions an user has. Is there a way of getting the current user object into the form class, so that i can customize the form in its __init__ method?

I think saving the current request in a thread local would be a possibility but this would be my last resort because I'm thinking it is a bad design approach.

Answer 1

Here is what i did recently for a Blog:

class BlogPostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):     form = BlogPostForm      def get_form(self, request, **kwargs):          form = super(BlogPostAdmin, self).get_form(request, **kwargs)          form.current_user = request.user          return form 

I can now access the current user in my forms.ModelForm by accessing self.current_user

EDIT: This is an old answer, and looking at it recently I realized the get_form method should be amended to be:

    def get_form(self, request, *args, **kwargs):          form = super(BlogPostAdmin, self).get_form(request, *args, **kwargs)          form.current_user = request.user          return form 

(Note the addition of *args)

Answer 2

Joshmaker's answer doesn't work for me on Django 1.7. Here is what I had to do for Django 1.7:

class BlogPostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):     form = BlogPostForm      def get_form(self, request, obj=None, **kwargs):         form = super(BlogPostAdmin, self).get_form(request, obj, **kwargs)         form.current_user = request.user         return form 

For more details on this method, please see this relevant Django documentation