In the Django-admin, interleave readonly and (regular) editable fields

Question

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?

Answer 1

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:

fields

how it works with readonly: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.fields

readonly 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