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.

Solution 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)

Solution 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

Solution 3

This use case is documented at ModelAdmin.get_form

[...] if you wanted to offer additional fields to superusers, you could swap in a different base form like so:

class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def get_form(self, request, obj=None, **kwargs):
        if request.user.is_superuser:
            kwargs['form'] = MySuperuserForm
        return super().get_form(request, obj, **kwargs)

---

If you just need to save a field, then you could just override ModelAdmin.save_model

from django.contrib import admin

class ArticleAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def save_model(self, request, obj, form, change):
        obj.user = request.user
        super().save_model(request, obj, form, change)

Solution 4

I think I found a solution that works for me: To create a ModelForm Django uses the admin's formfield_for_db_field-method as a callback.
So I have overwritten this method in my admin and pass the current user object as an attribute with every field (which is probably not the most efficient but appears cleaner to me than using threadlocals:

    def formfield_for_dbfield(self, db_field, **kwargs):
        field = super(MyAdmin, self).formfield_for_dbfield(db_field, **kwargs)
        field.user = kwargs.get('request', None).user
        return field

Now I can access the current user object in the forms __init__ with something like:

    current_user=self.fields['fieldname'].user

Solution 5

Another way you can solve this issue is by using Django currying which is a bit cleaner than just attaching the request object to the form model.

from django.utils.functional import curry

class BlogPostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = BlogPostForm

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

This has the added benefit making your init method on your form a bit more clear as others will understand that it's being passed as a kwarg and not just randomly attached attribute to the class object before initialization.

class BlogPostForm(forms.ModelForm):

   def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
       self.current_user = kwargs.pop('current_user')
       super(BlogPostForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

View more solutions

Comments

[hcalves]

This is an AttributeError: kwargs.get('request', None).user

[maggie]

If form = BlogPostForm, what shall get_form actually return? A BlogPostForm or the ModelForm of the parent class of BlogPostAdmin...? How will BlogPostForm get used if you use get_form?

[zbyte]

I liked this but sadly doesn't work as downstream the code expects a form class and not a curry function. Doing this results in the following error "'function' object has no attribute 'base_fields'"

[Alexis R]

Could one add it to the kwargs directly?

[Oduvan]

@AndrewBarrett not for class, and not dangerous

[Oduvan]

how the code-snippet is different from the one shared by Joshmaker?

[Joshmaker]

@AndrewBarrett this should be safe because we are attaching the current_user to a form instance and a new one is newly created for each request (hence request being passed as a variable to this method).

[Andrew Barrett]

@Joshmaker Yeah for sure, not sure what I was smoking two years ago, have deleted my comment.