Django class-based view: How do I pass additional parameters to the as_view method?

Question

If your urlconf looks something like this:

url(r'^(?P<slug>[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)/$', MyView.as_view(), name = 'my_named_view')

then the slug will be available inside your view functions (such as 'get_queryset') like this:

self.kwargs['slug']

Every parameter that's passed to the as_view method is an instance variable of the View class. That means to add slug as a parameter you have to create it as an instance variable in your sub-class:

# myapp/views.py
from django.views.generic import DetailView

class MyView(DetailView):
    template_name = 'detail.html'
    model = MyModel
    # additional parameters
    slug = None

    def get_object(self, queryset=None):
        return queryset.get(slug=self.slug)

That should make MyView.as_view(slug='hello_world') work.

If you're passing the variables through keywords, use what Mr Erikkson suggested: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11494666/9903

It's worth noting you don't need to override get_object() in order to look up an object based on a slug passed as a keyword arg - you can use the attributes of a SingleObjectMixin https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/ref/class-based-views/mixins-single-object/#singleobjectmixin

# views.py
class MyView(DetailView):
    model = MyModel
    slug_field = 'slug_field_name'
    slug_url_kwarg = 'model_slug'
    context_object_name = 'my_model'

# urls.py
url(r'^(?P<model_slug>[\w-]+)/$', MyView.as_view(), name = 'my_named_view')

# mymodel_detail.html
{{ my_model.slug_field_name }}

(both slug_field and slug_url_kwarg default to 'slug')

If you want to add an object to the context for the template you can override get_context_data and add to its context. The request is also a part of self in case you need the request.user.

def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        context = super(MyTemplateView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
        if 'slug' in self.kwargs:
            context['object'] = get_object_or_404(MyObject, slug=self.kwargs['slug'])
            context['objects'] = get_objects_by_user(self.request.user)

        return context