Pass current user to initial for CreateView in Django

Question

In my project I have User model from standard auth Django model and the Todo model. User can have many Todo.

When signed in user creates a todo he must be assigned to the todo automatically. I want to pass current user to initial data of the CreateView. It seems to me that I'm on right way. This is how the form object looks:

class TodoView(CreateView):
  model = Todo
  fields = ('name', 'date')

  success_url = '/todos/'

  def get_initial(self):
    return {
      'user': self.request.user
    }

And this is a model:

class Todo(models.Model):
  user = models.ForeignKey(User)
  name = models.TextField()
  date = models.DateField()

But it seems that that's not enough because I have an exception when the valid data goes from the client side. This is the exception:

IntegrityError at /todos/new

todos_todo.user_id may not be NULL

Request Method:     POST
Request URL:    http://localhost:8000/todos/new
Django Version:     1.6.2
Exception Type:     IntegrityError
Exception Value:    

todos_todo.user_id may not be NULL

Exception Location:     /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/django/db/backends/sqlite3/base.py in execute, line 450
Python Executable:  /usr/bin/python
Python Version:     2.7.5

Is that possible at all to pass the current user to the model of the CreateView? How to do it in best practice in the Django?

Answer 1

You need to use the form_valid method instead of get_initial. Something like this:

def form_valid(self, form):
    form.instance.user = self.request.user
    return super(TodoView, self).form_valid(form)

I have never used get_initial, but I guess it doesn't do anything because you don't include the user field. That wouldn't be useful anyway, because you don't want the user to be able to change the value.