Making Django admin display the Primary Key rather than each object's Object type

Question

In Django 1.1 admin, when I go to add or change an object, my objects are displayed as:

Select host to change
    * Add host

    Host object
    Host object
            


        

Answer 1

Add a __unicode__() method to Host. To show the primary key of your host objects, you'd want something like:

class Host(models.Model):
    host = models.CharField(max_length=100, primary_key=True)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.pk

    ...

You might want to think about showing the contents of the host field:

class Host(models.Model):
    host = models.CharField(max_length=100, primary_key=True)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.host

    ...

You'll need to do something similar for every model you've got.

For Python 3 compatibility, you'll want to do something like this (see the documentation):

from __future__ import unicode_literals
from django.utils.encoding import python_2_unicode_compatible

@python_2_unicode_compatible
class Host(models.Model):
    host = models.CharField(max_length=100, primary_key=True)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.host

    ...

Answer 2

contrib.admin has been reworked in 1.0, and old Admin classes inside models no longer work. What you need is ModelAdmin subclass in your_application.admin module, e.g.

from your_application.models import Host
from django.contrib import admin

class HostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ('host',)

admin.site.register(Host, HostAdmin)

Or use __unicode__ in the model itself, e.g.

class Host(models.Model):
    host = models.CharField(max_length=100,primary_key=True)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.host

Answer 3

It might also be worth mentioning that, if you are using an auto-incrementing primary key for your models, you will need to coerce it into a string, eg:

def __unicode__(self):
    return str(self.pk)