Hide model from main admin list, but allow creation in inline editor

Question

In my Django app, I have an Attribute model which has a many-to-many relationship to a MeasurementMethod model.

I put an inline for MeasurementMethod in the admin interface for Attribute, but I don't think it is useful to have a separate interface for managing MeasurementMethods at all; there's no reason why a user would say, "Gee, I wonder what Attributes can be measured by water displacement."

However, this left no way to create new MeasurementMethods from the inline editor until I found Anton Belonovich's post, which says that I need to admin.site.register(MeasurementMethod) first. I did that, and sure enough the edit and create buttons appeared.

But now on the admin page, where there's a list of apps and the models that can be managed, there's an entry for MeasurementMethod that I don't want.

Is there a way to get rid of it? Or is there a better way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

The solution is to register the MeasurementMethod class with a custom admin class that overrides has_module_permission:

@admin.register(MeasurementMethod)
class MeasurementMethodAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
  def has_module_permission(self, request):
    return False

Then the class can still be edited inline.

ModelAdmin.has_module_permission(request)
Should return True if displaying the module on the admin index page and accessing the module’s index page is permitted, False otherwise. ... Overriding it does not restrict access to the add, change or delete views ...