Thousand separator for DecimalField in Django Admin

Using Django The Admin
1

Is there a way to add a thousand separator in Django admin for DecimalField?

This is my models.py, inhabitants field is what I am concerned about:

class City(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    country = models.ForeignKey(Country, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    inhabitants = models.DecimalField(
        max_digits=19,
        decimal_places=2,
        blank=True,
        null=True,
    )

    class Meta:
        verbose_name = "City"
        verbose_name_plural = "Cities"

    def __str__(self):
        return self.name

This is how it looks in my the most basic custom view(no thousand separator, only a decimal separator, that I have described in models.py):

image

I then went into settings.py and added this - USE_THOUSAND_SEPARATOR = True.
Now in the same custom view I see a thousand separators (commas).

image

However, in Django admin, nothing changes, thousand separator is not present, even with USE_THOUSAND_SEPARATOR = True in settings.py.

image

Am I missing a feature or its not intended to be displayed with thousand separators in Django admin for some reason?

Thank you!

Edit: when I think about it deeper … it probably should not be possible to add the thousand separators. It’s kind of raw data that we are editing in the Admin… that is why it is not allowed to add the physical commas in between the numbers. In the UI - where I am not modifying the data, its possible. Unless use JS and add commas that way(which is probably what Django would do also). Something similar to this:

q = id_inhabitants
<input type=​"number" name=​"inhabitants" value=​"100000000.00" step=​"0.01" id=​"id_inhabitants">​
q.value
'100000000.08'
parseFloat(q.value).toLocaleString();
'100,000,000.08'
document.getElementById('id_inhabitants').type="text"
'text'
q.value = parseFloat(q.value).toLocaleString();
'100,000,000.08'

and then we get the commas:

image
image1521Ă—491 39.8 KB

But then if we try to save this value, it of course gives us an error:

The specified value “100,000,000.10” cannot be parsed, or is out of range.

Django does not like that it’s not a number field anymore. So then we also must change the DecimalField to CharField. Then make sure only numbers without commas go to the db… quite a lot of work. :expressionless:

2

I’m not sure there’s still a question here, but yes, there’s a huge difference between a display field and an input field in html. A lot of what you’re describing here has to do with those differences in HTML and have nothing specifically to do with Django. (You’d be encountering this regardless of the web framework being used.)

1 Like
3

So probably some custom JavaScript is needed to convert the number input field to text field, then check each keystroke, from the user input remove what is NaN, apply commas when necessary, apply decimal separator when necessary, then before submitting to the database - convert the user inputted string to number, field type back to number and then such field will be allowed to submit to the db.

Possible, but have to be a JS wizard.

Unless there is a better way? :slight_smile: Using django-money package or something…?

4

Again - this is not a Django-specific issue. You do not need a Django-specific package. You can look for any JavaScript widget that does this sort of manipulation in the HTML input field.

Where you would need to find something Django-specific would be if you wanted to use a CharField for the input, allow the separators to be submitted in the data, and perform the cleaning on the back end. In that situation, you’d be looking for code you could use in the clean_<field> method.

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