Tying in to Django Admin's Model History

Question

The Setup:

• I'm working on a Django application which allows users to create an object in the database and then go back and edit it as much as they desire.
• Django's admin site keeps a history of the changes made to objects through the admin site.

The Question:

• How do I hook my application in to the admin site's change history so that I can see the history of changes users make to their "content"?

Answer 1

The admin history is just an app like any other Django app, with the exception being special placement on the admin site.

The model is in django.contrib.admin.models.LogEntry.

When a user makes a change, add to the log like this (stolen shamelessly from contrib/admin/options.py:

from django.utils.encoding import force_unicode
from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
from django.contrib.admin.models import LogEntry, ADDITION
LogEntry.objects.log_action(
    user_id         = request.user.pk, 
    content_type_id = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(object).pk,
    object_id       = object.pk,
    object_repr     = force_unicode(object), 
    action_flag     = ADDITION
)

where object is the object that was changed of course.

Now I see Daniel's answer and agree with him, it is pretty limited.

In my opinion a stronger approach is to use the code from Marty Alchin in his book Pro Django (see Keeping Historical Records starting at page 263). There is an application django-simple-history which implements and extends this approach (docs here).