Filter a User list using a UserProfile field in Django Admin

Question

I'm trying to filter the User list in Django using a UserProfile Field... I need to implement a queue system where new users are put in a queue until an Admin approves them.

I simply added a is_in_queue boolean field to my UserProfile model... However, when displaying the user list in my Admin area, I realized that you can't filter the list using a Model's foreign key field (in this case, a field of UserProfile)

Apparently, list_display items can be callables but list_filter can't, so I can list IF a user is in the queue without a problem, but the admin would have to scroll through the whole user list to spot which ones are in the queue which makes no sense... Filtering only users that are in the queue (using userprofile.in_queue) would be much more practical...

Finally, I thought about adding a custom view to my admin area that would list only the user in the queue, but that custom view does not show up on the Admin area Index page, and putting together a whole new AdminSite only for a new filtering option seems a bit over the top...

So basically to sum it up: Can I filter my User list based on a UserProfile field? If not, can I add a custom view that's accessible from the front page without having to create a completely new AdminSite only for that?

Answer 1

You may want to take a look in to using a custom manager for the admin_objects of your model.

class UserAdminManager(models.AdminManager):
"""
Custom manager for the User model.
"""
def get_query_set(self):
    """
    Overwrites the get_query_set to only return Users in the queue.
    """
    return super(UserAdminManager, self).get_query_set().filter(userprofile__queue=True)

By overwriting the get_query_set method you can filter the results. Then just assign this to the admin_objects property of your User model.

admin_objects = UserAdminManager()

Some of the property names in my example may be wrong, as I don't know your model setup, but hopefully you get the idea.

You can research this further by checking out the django docs and searching for "custom managers".

Answer 2

Django 1.3 fixed that - list_filter now allows to span relations:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.list_filter

Answer 3

It sounds to me like the quickest and easiest option is to add a new admin view to your application, specifically for your custom user model. See the Django admin docs for details, though it sounds like you know how to use Admin already.

Once the admin page is specific to your model, all your custom fields will no longer be foreign keys. This would make filtering easy.