Filtering by custom date range in Django admin

Note: I wrote this answer in 2009, when the required functionality was not available in Django as a public API. For Django 1.4+, see the other answers.

This functionality isn't provided as far as I'm aware, but you can build it yourself.

Firstly, you can filter items using date__gte and date__lte as GET arguments in the url.

For example

/admin/myapp/bar/?date__gte=2009-5-1&date__lt=2009-8-1

will display all bar objects with dates in May, June or July 2009.

Then if you override the admin/change_list.html template file, you can add widgets for start and end dates, which navigate to the required url.

---

Hat tip to Daniel's answer to another SO question, which taught me about using queryset filter parameters as GET arguments.

You can use this up-to-date one: https://github.com/silentsokolov/django-admin-rangefilter.

In django 1.4, you can user list_filter. try:

from django.contrib.admin import DateFieldListFilter
class PersonAdmin(ModelAdmin):
    list_filter = (
        ('date_field_name', DateFieldListFilter),
    )

This will give some built-in ranges, but it will work if you put the date range in url, like:

?date__gte=2009-5-1&date__lt=2009-8-1

If you need a date picker (like jquery), then you need to extend DateFieldListFilter. I sent a patch to django-admin-filtrate, so, check there soon.