Custom field access in Wagtail ReportView needs official documentation #13103

ASneakyToast · 2025-05-10T16:29:03Z

Pertinent section of the Wagtail docs

https://docs.wagtail.org/en/stable/extending/adding_reports.html#reusing-the-functionality

Details

The documentation for Wagtail's ReportView currently lacks information on how to include custom computed fields in report exports. There's a powerful pattern involving the custom. prefix that allows developers to add dynamically generated fields to reports, but this isn't documented anywhere.

I'd like to add a new subsection under "Adding reports" titled "Adding custom fields to report exports" which documents:

How to prefix field names with custom. in the list_export attribute
How to set up corresponding entries in export_headings
How to configure custom_field_preprocess to specify processing methods
The critical step of overriding the to_row_dict method to handle these custom fields correctly

Example code to be included in the documentation:

from collections import OrderedDict
from django.urls import reverse
from wagtail.admin.views.reports import ReportView
from wagtail.coreutils import multigetattr

class CustomReportView(ReportView):
list_export = [
'title',
'created_at',
'custom.edit_link', # Custom field with the custom. prefix
]

export_headings = {
    'title': 'Title',
    'created_at': 'Created Date',
    'custom.edit_link': 'Edit URL',
}

def __init__(self, **kwargs):
    super().__init__(**kwargs)
    # Define processors for custom fields
    self.custom_field_preprocess = {
        "custom.edit_link": {
            self.FORMAT_CSV: self.get_edit_link,
            self.FORMAT_XLSX: self.get_edit_link,
        }
    }

def get_edit_link(self, obj):
    """Generate an edit link for the object"""
    edit_url = reverse('wagtailadmin_pages:edit', args=(obj.id,))
    return self.request.build_absolute_uri(edit_url)

def to_row_dict(self, item):
    """Override to handle custom fields with the custom. prefix"""
    return OrderedDict(
        (field, multigetattr(item, field))
        if not field.startswith("custom.")
        else (field, item)
        for field in self.list_export
    )

Working on this

Happy to submit this documentation change, but I think there's gotta be an easier way to implement custom fields without needing to override to_row_dict. This would be my first contribution, so my experience is limited, but I'd love try and implement this improvement with a little guided direction.

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Custom field access in Wagtail ReportView needs official documentation #13103

Custom field access in Wagtail ReportView needs official documentation #13103

Custom field access in Wagtail ReportView needs official documentation #13103

Custom field access in Wagtail ReportView needs official documentation #13103

Comments

Pertinent section of the Wagtail docs

Details

Working on this

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