Display tick and cross icons for a property in the Django administration console

Question:

In the Django admin if the field is a BooleanField or NullBooleanField, Django will display a pretty “on” or “off” icon instead of True or False.

Now, I don’t really have a BooleanField in my model by I do have a property fior which I’d like to display the icons but when I try doing so, Django screams that 'SomeAdmin.list_filter[0]' refers to 'is_activated' which does not refer to a Field.

Is it possible to display those nice little icons for this field without hacking Django too much.

Thanks

Asked By: Mridang Agarwalla

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Answers:

You don’t want to use list_filter. The property you’re looking for is list_display. The documentation offers an example of how you can create a column that behaves like a boolean in the display. In short, you do something like this:

  1. Create a method in the class:

    def is_activated(self)
        if self.bar == 'something':
            return True
        return False
    
  2. add the .boolean method attribute directly below the is_activated method:

    is_activated.boolean = True
    
  3. Add the method as a field in list_display:

    class MyAdmin(ModelAdmin):
    list_display = [‘name’, ‘is_activated’]

  4. You’ll notice the column name is probably now “Is Activated” or something like that. If you want the column heading to change, you use the short_description method attribute:

    is_activated.short_description = "Activated"
    
Answered By: Jordan Reiter

The correct way to do this now in Django 3.0+ is with @admin.display.

    @admin.display(
      boolean=True,
      ordering='-publish_date',
      description='Is Published?', 
    ) 
    def is_published(self, obj):
        return obj.publish_date is not None
Answered By: blakev
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