add an extra link to preview your object in a Django admin form

Question

In my django application we are enabling our client to customize their web page. In order to do that I created a model to generate the template and it is actually working fine. My problem is that I would like to add a preview link into the admin form. This way I could do "Save and continue editing" to save the template and if I want I could click this link to preview it while editing the page.

I already activated the preview from the List display but I want this field to show into the form directly.

  def get_absolute_url(self):
          return "preview/%i/" % self.id

  def preview_template(self):
      return '<a href="' + self.get_absolute_url() + '" target="_blank">Preview</a>'
  preview_template.allow_tags = True
  preview_template.short_description = 'Preview'

  class BlockPageAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display    = ( ... 'preview_template',)

This is working but is there a way to add it directly in the update form?

UPDATE

I got it working by following the main idea in this question: Adding an extra button to one object in django admin

I finally added the javascript file in the admin configuration of my model and I wrote a javascript function to generate the url of the preview object. I had to wrote a view to display the preview has I wished. The difference with the solution on the post was that I did a Button instead of a submit input, plus my javascript open a pop up of the preview page. So you still stay in the admin interface where you can update the model as you wish while previewing your changes.

Thank you!

Answer 1

You could just override the template for the change_form, or you could add a link to the object tools, which is a common place to put a "preview" link. In fact, Django admin puts the "View on site" preview link for models that have get_absolute_url defined in the same place.