Django Admin does not use `get_FOO_display`

Hello All,

An issue I encountered while working with Django admin. I had a model with a field that uses Choices as follows:

status = FSMField(default=STATUSES.PENDING, choices=STATUSES, protected=True)

I overrode the get_status_display method, but to my surprise, it did not have any effect in the Django admin.

Upon investigating Django’s code, I found the following method in contrib.admin

def display_for_field(value, field, empty_value_display):
    from django.contrib.admin.templatetags.admin_list import _boolean_icon

    if getattr(field, "flatchoices", None):
        return dict(field.flatchoices).get(value, empty_value_display)

I noticed that this method uses flatchoices to get the display value for fields with choices. However, it does not take into account any custom display methods that may have been defined for the field.

To resolve this issue, I modified the code to use get_FOO_display instead of flatchoices as follows:

def display_for_field(value, field, empty_value_display, model=None):
    from django.contrib.admin.templatetags.admin_list import _boolean_icon

    if getattr(field, "flatchoices", None):
        if model:
            return getattr(model, "get_%s_display" % field.name)()
        return dict(field.flatchoices).get(value, empty_value_display)

This modification allowed my custom display method to work as expected in the Django admin.

However, I am curious to know why Django’s code behaves this way and how I can make use of this behavior in my application.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.