Injecting the authenticated user when creating a model with CreateView

I had a Django model that had 2 regular attributes and a user Foreign Key:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class Notes(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    text = models.TextField()
    user = models.ForeignKey(
            User, 
            on_delete=models.CASCADE)

The problem started when I wanted to create a new instance using a CreateView but I wanted to create the model with the user being the logged in user. In the form, however, I would only display the fields text and title, but internally I wanted to fill the model with the authenticated user.

First I created a simple CreateView class:

class NotesCreateView(CreateView):
    model = Notes
    success_url = '/notes'
    fields = ('title', 'text')

But when I tried to save the model to the database, I would get an error: NOT NULL constraint failed: notes_notes.user_id.

The problem was that when calling the method form_valid , the CreateView would call the method form.save() that would try to go to the database. Since we have no user, the error happens at the database layer.

My first approach was trying to add the user in the form or even in the cleaned_data. If I done it this way, when I called the form.save() method, it would just work. Although I tried a lot, I couldn’t do it. So I needed something a bit more tricky. Here is the solution:

class NotesCreateView(CreateView):
    model = Notes
    success_url = '/notes'
    fields = ('title', 'text')

    def form_valid(self, form):
        self.object = form.save(commit=False)
        self.object.user = self.request.user
        self.object.save()
        return HttpResponseRedirect(self.get_success_url())

What is happening here is that I tell the .save() method to not save anything on the database. This way, we get an instance of the model, but no commitment, and thus, no errors. Once we have the object we can inject the logged user and finally save the object to the database, which can happen with no errors.

There you go :) Now your models are created with an associated user. Nice and easy!

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