How to show date_created in Django admin

Question

I have a model created in Django 1.5 as below:

class Number(models.Model):
    phone_number = models.CharField("Phone Number", max_length=10, unique=True)

I set up Django admin as below:

from django.contrib import admin
from demo.models import Message, Number, Relationship, SmsLog

class NumberAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    search_fields = ['phone_number']

admin.site.register(Number, NumberAdmin)

I believe Django add "date_created" column to the database automatically (because I know it sorts the data entries by creation time in admin console). Is there a way to view those time/dates in admin console? The closest I have go to is Django tutorial and StackOverflow ,but I do not want to create another column on my own (pub_date in Django official tutorial's example) and add it if possible. Is there a way to do it and if so, could someone show me how to? Thank you!

Answer 1

Django does not automatically add a date_created column. If you want to track the creation date, you have to declare it in your model.

You may be getting the illusion that it does because if you do not specify a sort order in the model or in the admin class for the model, it will default to sorting by primary key, which will increase according to the order the model instances were created.