How to set ForeignKey in CreateView?

Question

I have a model:

class Article(models.Model):
    text = models.CharField()
    author = models.ForeignKey(User)

How do I write class-based view that creates a new model instance and sets author foreign key to request.user?

Update:

Solution moved to separate answer below.

Answer 1

I solved this by overriding form_valid method. Here is verbose style to clarify things:

class CreateArticle(CreateView):
    model = Article

    def form_valid(self, form):
        article = form.save(commit=False)
        article.author = self.request.user
        #article.save()  # This is redundant, see comments.
        return super(CreateArticle, self).form_valid(form)

Yet we can make it short (thanks dowjones123), this case is mentioned in docs.:

class CreateArticle(CreateView):
    model = Article

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

Answer 2

I just stumbled into this problem and this thread led me in the right direction (thank you!). Based on this Django documentation page, we can avoid calling the form's save() method at all:

class CreateArticle(LoginRequiredMixin, CreateView):
    model = Article

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

Answer 3

You should set up a CreateView using a ModelForm for that model. In the form definition, you set the ForeignKey to have the HiddenInput widget, and then use the get_form method on the view to set the value of your user:

forms.py:

from django import forms

class ArticleForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Article
        widgets = {"user": forms.HiddenInput()}

views.py:

from django.views.generic import *
from myapp.forms import ArticleForm
from myapp.models import Article

class NewArticleView(CreateView):
    model = Article
    form_class = ArticleForm
    def get_form(self, form_class):
        initials = {
            "user": self.request.user
        }
        form = form_class(initial=initials)
        return form

Answer 4

Berislav's code in views.py doesn't work for me. The form is rendered as expected, with the user value in a hidden input, but the form is not saved (I don't know why). I have tried a slightly different approach, that works for me:

views.py

from django.views.generic import *
from myapp.forms import ArticleForm
from myapp.models import Article

class NewArticleView(CreateView):
    model = Article
    form_class = ArticleForm
    def get_initial(self):
        return {
            "user": self.request.user
        }

Answer 5

There are answers that are mainly related to the User model foreign key. However, let's suppose a simple scenario in which there is a model Comment containing a foreign key of the Article model, and you need to have a CreateView for Comment where each comment will have a foreign key of the Article model. In that case, the Article id would probably be in the URL, for example, /article/<article-id>/comment/create/. Here is how you can deal with such a scenario

class CommentCreateView(CreateView):
    model = Comment
    # template_name, etc 


    def dispatch(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        self.article = get_object_or_404(Article, pk=self.kwargs['article_id'])
        return super(CommentCreateView, self).dispatch(request, *args, **kwargs)


    def form_valid(self, form):
        form.instance.article= self.article    # if the article is not a required field, otherwise you can use the commit=False way
        return super(CommentCreateView, self).form_valid(form)