More useful output for User.__unicode__ allowing easy formatting of all admin forms that list users from settings

[Paul McLanahan]

When choosing a user in an admin form for a model with a relationship to the django.auth.models.User model, the field always shows the username attribute, which in many systems isn't very informative. This patch would allow control over the formatting of those fields from the settings module.

This introduces a new setting named "AUTH_USER_STR_FORMATTER", which should be set to a callable that will be passed the User model instance and is expected to return a string to be used as a plain text representation of the User object.

Example:

# settings.py

def user_str_formatter(user):
    fname = user.get_full_name()
    return "%s (%s)" % (fname, user.username) if fname else user.username

AUTH_USER_STR_FORMATTER = user_str_formatter

[Paul McLanahan]

Patch

[Alex Gaynor]

This feels like adding a setting to control something you can already do. Either use proxy subclasses to overide unicode, or just output what you want where you what. For those reasons it is my strong inclination to wontfix this, however I'm going to mark it as DDN.

[Paul McLanahan]

I did try a couple things with which I wasn't fully satisfied. My main thought was that the User model is used in relationships so often that a more central approach to modifying the model class itself might adhere more closely to DRY. I'm very open to the idea that I just haven't found the best other solution though. Thanks for the comments.

[Paul McLanahan]

You're completely right Alex. Using my own proxy model would be best. I just spaced on that for some reason. I do think that this particular case is so common that it might warrant a setting and not require something that I would consider to be a more advanced technique, but I do see your point. Thanks again.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

Not worth it. Firstly, there's proxy models now. More importantly, it's symptom patching. The only case this is really a problem (where you are forced to use the __unicode__ method) is when displaying related models in the admin. That's not at all specific to the User model and should be solved holistically and probably entirely within the Admin interface (or, at a minimum, within the related fields infrastructure).