How do I change the default lookup field in the admin

[danihodovic]

Using DRF and changing the lookup field is easy

class ProductViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    lookup_field = "hashid"
    # ...

How do I do the same within admin so that http://localhost:8000/admin/core/product/ links to a product change page?

[ericls]

Hi @danihodovic , sorry but I'm not aware of a simple way to do this in Django admin. Looks like Django admin would always use the primary key to identify objects. May I ask what's your use case for this? Is it you want the hashid instead of real id to show up in the URL?

[danihodovic]

Is it you want the hashid instead of real id to show up in the URL?

Correct

I managed to hack around this by overriding some of the admin.ModelAdmin methods:

class ModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    """
    Filtering fields via hashid in the admin url.
    """

    def get_changelist_instance(self, request):
        instance = super().get_changelist_instance(request)
        instance.pk_attname = "hashid"
        return instance

    def get_object(self, request, object_id, from_field=None):
        return super().get_object(request, object_id, from_field="hashid")

FWIW I also use the following classes to make usage via DRF easier:

class ModelViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    lookup_field = "hashid"
    lookup_url_kwarg = "pk"


class ModelSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    id = serializers.CharField(source="hashid", read_only=True)

[ericls]

@danihodovic , Thanks for providing the workaround. Do you want to close this issue or do you think we should include the snippet in the docs or somewhere in the code?

[danihodovic]

I'll create a PR to include it in the docs.