In my Django admin, there are a few fields that I would like to define as read only. If I use readonly_fields, these float to the bottom of the page. This is not desirable in my use case, I want to preserve the ordering I had before I set them as read only. How should I do this?
ModelAdmin.readonly_fields not affect on fields_order and not add any additional field in AdminForm if fields or fieldsets are defined.
in normal mode:
class MyModelAdmin(ModelAdmin):
fields = 'title', 'description', 'my_first_readonly', 'visible'
readonly_fields = 'my_first_readonly', 'my_second_readonly'
The order of fields should be 'title', 'description', 'my_first_readonly', 'visible'. 'my_second_readonly' not appears, because it not listed in fields.
more info here:
how it works with readonly: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.fields
you can find mention about field ordering there: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.readonly_fields
Only one reason, why order of fields can change itself:
ModelAdmin.get_fields or/and ModelAdmin.get_fieldsets are overridden
more here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.get_fields