Django, how to see session data in the admin interface

Question

I\'m using Django sessions and I would like a way of seeing the session data in the admin interface. Is this possible?

I.e. for each session I want to see the data store

Answer 1

Continuing from Tomasz's answer, I went with:

import pprint
from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session
class SessionAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def _session_data(self, obj):
        return pprint.pformat(obj.get_decoded()).replace('\n', '<br>\n')
    _session_data.allow_tags=True
    list_display = ['session_key', '_session_data', 'expire_date']
    readonly_fields = ['_session_data']
    exclude = ['session_data']
    date_hierarchy='expire_date'
admin.site.register(Session, SessionAdmin)

Answer 2

You can do something like this:

from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session
class SessionAdmin(ModelAdmin):
    def _session_data(self, obj):
        return obj.get_decoded()
    list_display = ['session_key', '_session_data', 'expire_date']
admin.site.register(Session, SessionAdmin)

It might be even that get_decoded can be used directly in list_display. And in case there's some catch that prevents this from working ok, you can decode the session data yourself, based on the linked Django source.

Answer 3

EB's otherwise great answer left me with the error "Database returned an invalid value in QuerySet.dates(). Are time zone definitions and pytz installed?". (I do have db tz info and pytz installed, and my app uses timezones extensively.) Removing the 'date_hierarchy' line resolved the issue for me. So:

import pprint
from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session
class SessionAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def _session_data(self, obj):
        return pprint.pformat(obj.get_decoded()).replace('\n', '<br>\n')
    _session_data.allow_tags=True
    list_display = ['session_key', '_session_data', 'expire_date']
    readonly_fields = ['_session_data']
    exclude = ['session_data']
admin.site.register(Session, SessionAdmin)

Answer 4

Session data is contained in a base64 encoded pickled dictionary. That's is what you're seeing in the admin because that data is stored in a TextField in the Session model.

I don't think any distributed django code stores the ip address in the session but you could do it yourself if you can access it.

In order to display the real session information, you may write your own form field that presents the decoded information. Keep in mind that you'll have to also overwrite the save method if you want to modify it. You can take a look at the encode and decode methods in django/contrib/sessions/models.py.