[Django]-Custom error message in Django admin actions

The message_user function used within the admin simply uses the contrib.messages package. You could try something like this:

from django.contrib import messages

# Then, when you need to error the user:
messages.error(request, "The message")

You can also use warning, debug, info and success in place of error

Hope that helps!

from django.contrib import messages
...
self.message_user(request, "The message", level=messages.ERROR)

Сan also be used (messages.ERROR, messages.WARNING, messages.DEBUG, messages.INFO, messages.SUCCESS)

You can use django.contrib.messages backend

from django.contrib import messages

def my_action(self, request, queryset):
  #do something
  messages.error(request,'Error message')

This will show the error message and the red error sign.

Not sure whether this was fixed in newer django versions (I found the behaviour you described in django 1.2.1 and also in django-grappelli 2.0), but if you use Bartek’s method above, you’d also probably want to change the admin templates to show the messages differently. Specifically in base.html:

Change this:

{% if messages %}
        <ul class="messagelist">{% for message in messages %}<li>{{ message }}</li>{% endfor %}</ul>
    {% endif %}

to this:

{% if messages %}
        <ul class="messagelist">{% for message in messages %}<li{% if message.tags %} class="{{ message.tags }}"{% endif %}>{{ message}}</li>{% endfor %}</ul>
    {% endif %}

You might still need to tweak some CSS on top of that too, but at least it would come up as a different li class on the HTML.

Here’s a sample CSS change (compatible with grappelli)

ul.messagelist li.error {
background: url('../img/icons/icon-no.png') 20px 50% no-repeat;
background-color: #f2e6e6;

}