How to enable django admin sidebar navigation in a custom view?

Question

I have a view inheriting from LoginRequiredMixin, TemplateView, which renders some data using the admin/base_site.html template as the base. I treat it as a part of the admin interface, so it requires an administrator login. I'd like to make this view a little bit more a part of the Django admin interface by enabling the standard sidebar navigation on the left-hand side.

Note that I don't have a custom ModelAdmin definition anywhere, I simply render the template at some predefined URL. There are no models used in the interface either, it parses and displays data from database-unrelated sources.

Currently, I just build the required context data manually, e.g.:

data = super().get_context_data(**kwargs)
data.update(**{
    "is_popup": False,
    "site_header": None,
    "is_nav_sidebar_enabled": True,
    "has_permission": True,
    "title": "My title",
    "subtitle": None,
    "site_url": None,
    "available_apps": []
})

The sidebar is visible, but displays an error message:

Adding an app to available_apps ("available_apps": ["my_app"]) doesn't help either:

So my question is - how do I do that? Is there a class I can inherit from to achieve this behaviour? Or a method I can call to get all required context data for base_site.html? Or perhaps I should insert some information in my template? Perhaps I need an AdminSite object, or can somehow call methods of the default one?

Answer 1

By accident I noticed there is a DefaultAdminSite object in django.contrib.admin.sites, and it's instantiated as site. Therefore, in my case, simply using site is sufficient.

from django.contrib.admin import AdminSite
from django.contrib.admin.sites import site
admin_site: AdminSite = site
data.update(**admin_site.each_context(self.request))

Furthermore, turns out I can just use the apps in case importing site would be an issue, just like DefaultAdminSite does it:

AdminSiteClass = import_string(apps.get_app_config("admin").default_site)
self._wrapped = AdminSiteClass()

Answer 2

The app_list.html template which is included in your base template requires a context variable available_apps with a structure as described here.

As you probably won't be able to make this include work properly with your app you could also override the {% block nav-sidebar %} in your base template and provide some HTML that fits your use-case.

But after all it's probably not such a good idea to reuse templates which are made for a different app (admin) with your app because it's difficult to predict how they will behave, what their requirements are and beyond this maintainance in the long term will also be a problem as they might change with future Django versions.

Answer 3

You have to include django admin's default context variables used in the template. This can be done by calling each_context function:

data.update(self.admin_site.each_context(request))

I also have custom admin views and templates in my projects and this works well for me.