Database View and Proxy Model

Displaying a database view

Sometimes you want to display data which comes from a database view and not from a Django model. It is really easy to do that. You just need to declare the model corresponding to the view in your models.py file but with the specific keyword managed=False in the class Meta and tell Django the database table name:

class QuestionSummary(models.Model):
	month = models.DateField()
	nbQuestionsByMonth = models.IntegerField()
	class Meta:
		managed = False
		db_table = 'app_questionsummary'

Then, you can reference the model in the admin.py as usual.

admin.site.register(QuestionSummary)

or

@admin.register(QuestionSummary)
class QuestionSummaryAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
...

This will not work at the moment, because the referenced table does not exist. But you should know this for when you come across this use case.

Proxying a model

If you want to display a model twice in the Django Admin (for whatever reason), you will not be able to simply add it twice in the admin.py file. First, you will need to create a proxy in the models.py file.

class AuthorClone(Author):
	class Meta:
		proxy=True
		verbose_name_plural = "The Authors clone"

Our proxy is abstracting the Author class. Then, you can create and register it in the admin.py.

class AuthorCloneAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
	fieldsets = [
	    ("Author information", {'fields': ['name','createdDate','updatedDate']}),
	]
	list_display = ('name','createdDate','updatedDate',)
	search_fields = ('name',)

admin.site.register(AuthorClone, AuthorCloneAdmin)

Now, if you check our Django admin page, you will see your author’s clone displayed in your list.