How to subclass django's generic CreateView with initial data?

Question

I'm trying to create a dialog which uses jquery's .load() function to slurp in a rendered django form. The .load function is passed the pk of the "alert" object. Also available in the class functions are things like self.request.user so I can pre-fill those fields, shown below in the Message model (models.py):

class Message(models.Model):

    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    alert = models.ForeignKey(Alert)
    date = models.DateTimeField()
    message = models.TextField()

Subclassing django's CreateView makes it pretty easy to generate a context with an instance of the ModelForm (views.py):

class MessageDialogView(CreateView):
    """ show html form fragment """
    model = Message
    template_name = "message.html"

    def get_initial(self):
        super(MessageDialogView, self).get_initial()
        alert = Alert.objects.get(pk=self.request.POST.get("alert_id"))
        user = self.request.user
        self.initial = {"alert":alert.id, "user":user.id, "message":"test"}
        return self.initial


    def post(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        super(MessageDialogView, self).post(request, *args, **kwargs)
        form_class = self.get_form_class()
        form = self.get_form(form_class)
        context = self.get_context_data(form=form)
        return self.render_to_response(context)

The problem here is that self.initial does not get rendered with the form. I have insured that the form is indeed calling get_initial and the form instance has the proper initial data in post, but when the form is rendered in the template message.html it doesn't grab any of the initial data like I would expect. Is there a special trick to get this to work? I've scoured the docs (seems to be lacking examples on generic based class views) and source but I can't see what I'm missing.

Answer 1

get_initial() should just return a dictionary, not be bothered with setting self.initial.

Your method should look something like this:

def get_initial(self):
    # Get the initial dictionary from the superclass method
    initial = super(YourView, self).get_initial()
    # Copy the dictionary so we don't accidentally change a mutable dict
    initial = initial.copy()
    initial['user'] = self.request.user.pk
       # etc...
    return initial