Passing Pk or Slug to Generic DetailView in Django?

Question

I am new to Django Class based views. I am trying to make a simple view to get details of a post. My views.py:

from django.views.generic import ListView, View, DetailView 
class GenreDetail(DetailView):
            model = Post
            template_name = "post.html"

My urls.py:

urlpatterns = [
        url(r'(?P<post_id>[^/]+)', GenreDetail.as_view(), name = 'post'),
        url(r'(?P<post_id>[^/]+)/(?P<slug>[-\w]+)$', GenreDetail.as_view()),
    ] 

Error that I get:

AttributeError at /2/memoirs-of-a-geisha-by-arthur-golden
Generic detail view GenreDetail must be called with either an object pk or a slug.

So the pk or slug is not passed to the Generic Detailview. How do I pass that ? I assume from url it can pick up but it's not.

Answer 1

url patterns are checked in the order you define them

so here:

urlpatterns = [
        url(r'(?P<post_id>[^/]+)', GenreDetail.as_view(), name = 'post'),
        url(r'(?P<post_id>[^/]+)/(?P<slug>[-\w]+)$', GenreDetail.as_view()),
    ] 

...the first pattern is getting matched (because it does not end with $ so the extra segment is just ignored)

...and that pattern only passes a single keyword arg

Generally it is a bad idea to have multiple url patterns pointing to the same view. If possible you should try and make a single regex (eg using optional groups) which handles the various cases of the url for a particular view. It's more explicit that way.

On the other hand, simply reversing the order of your patterns to put the more explicit one first would also work and be correct (this is the Django rule of urlpatterns!)

urlpatterns = [
        url(r'(?P<post_id>[^/]+)/(?P<slug>[-\w]+)$', GenreDetail.as_view()),
        url(r'(?P<post_id>[^/]+)', GenreDetail.as_view(), name = 'post'),
    ] 

As @ozgur mentions you also need to tell the view to use post_id instead of pk by setting pk_url_kwarg