Admin complains about a missing field even if it is not missing

[Ivan Giuliani]

Django raises an ImproperlyConfigured exception (NewsAdmin.fieldsets[1][1]['fields'] refers to field `pub_date` that is missing from the form) when the following admin interface is defined:

class NewsAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    fieldsets = (
        (None, {
            'fields': ('title', 'text'),
        }),
        (_('Other stuff'), {
            'fields': ('language', 'pub_date'),
        }),
    )

But the model has a pub_date field:

class News(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True, blank=True)
    text = models.TextField()
    language = models.ForeignKey(LanguageRef)

    def save(self):
        if not self.pub_date:
            self.pub_date = datetime.datetime.now()
        super(News, self).save()

    class Meta:
        get_latest_by = "pub_date"
        verbose_name = "news"
        verbose_name_plural = "news"

If I remove pub_date from the fields attribute in the NewsAdmin everything works as expected.

[Karen Tracey]

I suspect you get the error because auto_now=True is specified for this field. That makes it a non-editable field, since the value is not something the user can change, see ​http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/model-api/#datefield:

"Note that the current date is always used; it’s not just a default value that you can override."

Since it's not editable there's no point in putting it in the form.

[Batiste Bieler]

That would be still useful to be able to display the field in the admin. Maybe in a disabled input, ie: <input disabled />

[Karen Tracey]

Replying to batiste:

That would be still useful to be able to display the field in the admin. Maybe in a disabled input, ie: <input disabled />

This is possible now (new in 1.2) with ​readonly fields in the admin, though it does not actually used disabled inputs.

[anonymous]

For others who may run into this symptom for unrelated reasons, try restarting your server.

[mwaigaryan@…]

same problem in Django-1.4.2,is there a patch?

[alextreppass@…]

Replying to mwaigaryan@…:

same problem in Django-1.4.2,is there a patch?

As above, put it in the readonly_fields list in the model admin, then it displays fine