Question

I’m trying to subclass the base generic View object provided by Django so that I can control the rendering of the view fully but still use the cleaner class-based view method instead of mapping to a function.

This is my view so far:

from django.views.generic.base import View
from django.shortcuts import render
from account.forms import UserForm, UserProfileForm

class RegisterView(View):    
    def get(request, *args, **kwargs):

        user_form = UserForm()
        profile_form = UserProfileForm()

        return render(request, 'account/register.html', {'user_form': user_form, 'profile_form': profile_form})

    def post(request, *args, **kwargs):
        pass

When I try to navigate to the URL for this view I get this error from Django:

AttributeError at /account/register/

'RegisterView' object has no attribute 'META'

Request Method:     GET
Request URL:        http://localhost:8000/account/register/
Django Version:     1.4.3
Exception Type:     AttributeError
Exception Value:    'RegisterView' object has no attribute 'META'

Exception Location: C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\core\context_processors.py in debug, line 35
Python Executable:  C:\Python27\python.exe
Python Version:     2.7.3

Environment:


Request Method: GET
Request URL: http://localhost:8000/account/register/

Django Version: 1.4.3
Python Version: 2.7.3
Installed Applications:
('django.contrib.auth',
 'django.contrib.contenttypes',
 'django.contrib.sessions',
 'django.contrib.sites',
 'django.contrib.messages',
 'django.contrib.staticfiles',
 'django.contrib.admin',
 'account')

Installed Middleware:
('django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
 'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
 'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
 'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware')


Traceback:
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\core\handlers\base.py" in get_response
  111.                         response = callback(request, *callback_args, **callback_kwargs)
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\views\generic\base.py" in view
  48.             return self.dispatch(request, *args, **kwargs)
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\views\generic\base.py" in dispatch
  69.         return handler(request, *args, **kwargs)
File "C:\project\account\views.py" in get
  49.         return render(request, 'account/register.html', {'user_form': user_form, 'profile_form': profile_form})
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\shortcuts\__init__.py" in render
  40.         context_instance = RequestContext(request, current_app=current_app)
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\template\context.py" in __init__
  176.             self.update(processor(request))
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\core\context_processors.py" in debug
  35.     if settings.DEBUG and request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR') in settings.INTERNAL_IPS:

Exception Type: AttributeError at /account/register/
Exception Value: 'RegisterView' object has no attribute 'META'

The documentation doesn’t specify anything about any “META attribute” when subclassing generic views, so I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong or if this is even a permitted usage of the base generic view.

I’m a bit new to (serious) Python programming and to Django, so please forgive me if I’m missing something obvious about this.

Answer 1

Remember this is a class: you’ve missed the self argument in the definitions of get and post:

def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):