Diagram of django view lifecycle

Using Django The Admin
1

Hi folks,

I’m doing a quite a lot of work with django admin views on a project, and I’m wishing I had a diagram to refer to understand how a django admin page is created, in terms of when queries are made for each inline that is show on a page.

Does such a thing exist?

I’m thinking specifically about when get_queryset(), get_context_data() might be called, on the main model form, and then for any inlines, and so on.

I’m happy to have a go, as I’m sure I’ll need to come back to it in future, before I start, does this exist anywhere?

3

Sorry, didn’t notice at first that you were talking about the admin views.

I’m not aware of any detailed structural information on them.

4

Hey Chris, replying here for other people who land here looking for the same.
Your best bet would be to print something suggestive within each method of the classes BaseModelAdmin & ModelAdmin, you can find them under site-packages/django/contrib/admin/options.py

This is what I got, but keep in mind that this is the general order, not all methods will be executed for every action in the admin interface.

  1. get_changelist
  2. get_changelist_form
  3. get_changelist_formset
  4. get_form
  5. get_fieldsets
  6. get_prepopulated_fields
  7. get_readonly_fields
  8. get_queryset
  9. get_search_results
  10. get_urls
  11. get_inline_instances
  12. get_object
  13. formfield_for_foreignkey
  14. formfield_for_manytomany
  15. formfield_for_choice_field
  16. formfield_for_dbfield
  17. save_related
  18. delete_model
  19. save_model
  20. save_formset
  21. log_addition
  22. log_change
  23. log_deletion
2 Likes
5

Hello @Eleuthar , can you please give some example how you would go about printing and seeing the order?

I have to work with the Django admin these days and I really want to understand it better :slight_smile:

6

Create a virtual environment with venv and go to the options.py file in the above mentioned path.
At the beginning of each method, type the print statement.