A curious problem came up while working on creating user accounts for a project. I needed to take in credit card information while creating a user but only wanted to display the payment token that I got back from stripe. The best way to do this was using two forms for a single model on the Django Admin.

Create The Model Forms

The first step is to create two forms, one for creating an Account and a second for editing an Account. This will generally go in the admin.py file located within the app you are working in.

    class AccountChangeForm(ModelForm):
        class Meta:
            model = Account
            fields = ('email', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'phone', 'payment_token)


    class AccountCreateForm(ModelForm):
        card = CharField(initial=json.dumps(CARD, indent=4), widget=Textarea, required=True)

        class Meta:
            model = Account
            fields = ('email', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'phone', 'card_info')

Any model form you create wont have any effect until you set it within the appropriate ModelAdmin, in our case for the Account Model

class AccountAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    ...       
    form = AccountChangeForm

Set The Form You Want To Use In add_view And change_view

That solves the problem of only wanting to show the payment_token while editing the model but it won't show the AccountChangeForm when trying to create an account. The best way to set a form depending on which action you are taking in the model is though add_view and change_view.

    class AccountAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
        ...


        def add_view(self, request, form_url='', extra_context=None):
            ...
            self.form = AccountCreateForm


        def change_view(self, request, object_id, form_url='', extra_context=None):
            ...
            self.form = AccountChangeForm