Limiting visibility of Admin actions to `change` permission only isn't right.

[Paulo]

In the pr that introduced view only admin, there was also a change to require user to have the "change" permission in order to render admin actions.

This is a backwards incompatible change, as such, it would be good to have it in ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/2.1/

[Tim Graham]

On second thought, I wonder if this is the best design decision. For example, you would expect the default "deleted selected" bulk action to require the delete permission rather than the change permission, right?

[Hiroki Kiyohara]

I understood. You meant the behavior of ModelAdmin.get_actions has changed, and it should be described as backward incompatible change.
​https://github.com/django/django/blob/2.1a1/django/contrib/admin/options.py#L863-L865

I agree.

We need...

• Writing about it in the release note
• Adding "version changed" note here ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/actions/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.get_actions

Also I agree that the current design is not perfect.

• Actions like "CSV Download" requires only "view" permission, so disabling all actions by "change" permission does not make sense for me
• Django should notice which permission is required by each actions ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/5297#discussion_r42751084

[Hiroki Kiyohara]

I opened the Pull Request ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/9970
(Working at DjangoCongress JP 2018 Sprint).

[Paulo]

I agree with giving this change another look.
It would be more flexible to leave the permissions handling to the actions themselves.
Apps like django-tablib would no longer allow users to export without permission to change objects.

[Carlton Gibson]

The previous behaviour here is to show all actions regardless of permissions. If then you (for example) try to delete objects without the delete permission you'll hit a permission denied error.

The idea in the PR is that actions won't be available to read-only users, and that change will imply e.g. delete. Whilst nice in theory, neither of those seem to be true.

There's no current mechanism for actions to specify their permissions. That might be a good addition as a separate feature. We could then filter displayed actions on that basis.

For now, the consistent thing would seem to be to continue to display all actions regardless of permission levels, allowing that users may run into permission denied errors, as they will have up to now.