Member-only story

Optimal way to add custom fields to Django admin

Taiwo Kareem
4 min readJan 11, 2024

--

One of the best practices in software development is to reduce as much database queries as possible through optimisation. A good Software developer must always have optimisation in mind when architecting a software product.

In this article I will be showing two ways to add custom fields to Django admin and explain which is best for what scenario.

Option 1 — using the @property method

The @property method in python allows you to attach additional calculated attributes which can then be used in the Django admin. I will show an example of how to use it before addressing the pros and cons.

There are 78 books currently in the sample database i am using and 5,098,648 books already read by users

Book admin and statistics before adding the extra property

Scenario 1 — where there isn’t much computation going on, speed is negligible and there are no extra database queries. It’s simple to use and no extra database calls is invoked

--

--

No responses yet