Django: How to get current user in admin forms?

In Django's ModelAdmin, I need to display forms customized according to the permissions an user has. Is there a way of getting the current user object into the form class, so that i can customize the form in its __init__ method?

I think saving the current request in a thread local would be a possibility but this would be my last resort because I'm thinking it is a bad design approach.

Solution 1:

Here is what i did recently for a Blog:

class BlogPostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = BlogPostForm

    def get_form(self, request, **kwargs):
         form = super(BlogPostAdmin, self).get_form(request, **kwargs)
         form.current_user = request.user
         return form

I can now access the current user in my forms.ModelForm by accessing self.current_user

EDIT: This is an old answer, and looking at it recently I realized the get_form method should be amended to be:

    def get_form(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
         form = super(BlogPostAdmin, self).get_form(request, *args, **kwargs)
         form.current_user = request.user
         return form

(Note the addition of *args)

Solution 2:

Joshmaker's answer doesn't work for me on Django 1.7. Here is what I had to do for Django 1.7:

class BlogPostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = BlogPostForm

    def get_form(self, request, obj=None, **kwargs):
        form = super(BlogPostAdmin, self).get_form(request, obj, **kwargs)
        form.current_user = request.user
        return form

For more details on this method, please see this relevant Django documentation