django - Curious about get_form_kwargs in FormView

Question

I was having trouble with FormView recently and found that the way to go about doing it was to use get_form_kwargs.

Here is my code:

class InternalResetPasswordView(FormView):

template_name = 'reset_password.html'
form_class = forms.InternalPasswordResetForm

# success_message = "Password was reset successfully"

# To get request object
# http://notesondjango.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/modelform-formview-and-the-request-object/
# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13383381/show-message-after-password-change
# http://pydanny.com/simple-django-email-form-using-cbv.html
# http://bubuzzz.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/class-based-generic-views-in-django-a-simple-sample/
def get_form_kwargs(self):
    kwargs = super(InternalResetPasswordView, self).get_form_kwargs()
    kwargs['user'] = self.request.user
    return kwargs

def get_success_url(self):
    return reverse('user-detail', kwargs={'pk': self.request.user.id})

@method_decorator(login_required)
def dispatch(self, *args, **kwargs):
    return super(InternalResetPasswordView, self).dispatch(*args, **kwargs)   

'''
def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):

    context = super(InternalResetPasswordView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
    context['InternalPasswordResetForm'] = context.get('form')

    return context


def get_form_kwargs(self):
    kwargs = super(InternalResetPasswordView, self).get_form_kwargs()
    kwargs['request'] = self.request
    return kwargs

'''
# self.request.user method obtained from
# https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/class-based-views/generic-editing/
def form_valid(self, form):
    current_password = form.cleaned_data['old_password']
    new_password =  form.cleaned_data['new_password1']
    confirm_new_password = form.cleaned_data['new_password2']
    user = self.request.user
    if user.check_password(current_password) and new_password == confirm_new_password:
        user.set_password(new_password)
        user.save()
        # form.valid() redirects to get_success_url
    return super(InternalResetPasswordView, self).form_valid(form)

After looking at this post, I still don't understand why get_form_kwargs has to be used and why using self.request instead of self.request.user in this case gives __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'request'.

Could someone explain this to me?

Thanks for all the help :)

Answer 1

The get_form_kwargs method will return a dictionary with the kwargs that will be passed to the __init__ of your form. Now, if you have a form that expects a kwarg named user and pass it a kwarg named request it will complain with the error you see. If you want to pass request instead of user (this is what I usually do since the request contains the user) then you should define your form class like this:

class RequestForm(forms.Form):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.request = kwargs.pop('request', None)
        super(RequestForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)