CustomAdminViewsContext.md

Custom Admin Views With Context

When writing custom admin views via extending the AdminSite or ModelAdmin classes' get_urls method, or by manually including URLs, I couldn't figure out how I was meant to ensure my admin-facing templates received the same context as regular admin views, for data like title, site_header etc. Without this, the full admin UI won't render.

The solution, once I found it, was pretty simple:

# views.py
from django.contrib import admin
from django.views.generic import View

from .models import MyModel


class MyCustomAdminView(View):
    model = MyModel
    
    # ...
    
    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        context = super(MyCustomAdminView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
        context.update(admin.site.each_context(self.request))
        context.update({
            'opts': self.model._meta,
            'title': 'Page title for my custom view',
        })
        return context

• Calling the AdminSite's each_context method provides a bunch of useful data that the admin UI requires to function properly.
• The opts context variable holds various model metadata and is used in the breadcrumb component of the admin UI.
• Finally, the title variable populates the page's <title> tag as well as an <h1> located at the top of most of the standard admin templates.

For use with multiple views, you might find it easier to include the above in a mixin. And don't forget to run your own permission checks inside the views you create.