Using class based generic view DetailView with a ModelForm reveals a bug - how to proceed?

Question

I\'ve been impressed how rapidly a functional website can go together with generic views in the tutorials. Also, the workflow for form processing is nice. I used the ModelFo

Answer 1

You are right I believe. This is a bug which stems from the fact that both ModelForm and Models have a _meta attribute. This same bug would exhibit itself anytime an object is returned from get_object() that contains a _meta attribute.

get_object does not have to return a Model instance. You can confirm this by looking at the source for DetailView and reading it's docstring:

class DetailView(SingleObjectTemplateResponseMixin, BaseDetailView):
    """
    Render a "detail" view of an object.

    By default this is a model instance looked up from `self.queryset`, but the
    view will support display of *any* object by overriding `self.get_object()`.
    """

Notice that the doc string explicitly says that any object is supported by overriding self.get_object().

Another piece of corroborating evidence is from the location where this bug itself occurs which is the get_template_names method of SingleObjectTemplateResponseMixin.

    # The least-specific option is the default <app>/<model>_detail.html;
    # only use this if the object in question is a model.
    if hasattr(self.object, '_meta'):
        names.append("%s/%s%s.html" % (
            self.object._meta.app_label,
            self.object._meta.object_name.lower(),
            self.template_name_suffix
        ))
    elif hasattr(self, 'model') and hasattr(self.model, '_meta'):
        names.append("%s/%s%s.html" % (
            self.model._meta.app_label,
            self.model._meta.object_name.lower(),
            self.template_name_suffix
        ))

Again looking at this code, the comment itself say "If the object in question is a model". From this comment we can infer that the object doesn't always have to be a model.

However if you are trying to create a view that allows someone to edit/create/delete a model you really should have a look at the Editing Views which include FormView, CreateView, EditView and DeleteView. You can see more information for these at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/class-based-views/#editing-views.

To answer the question as to how to report the bug, you should follow the guidelines detailed at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/internals/contributing/#reporting-bugs.