Problem with generic views when the model is called 'User'.

[ttt@…]

Context

I have extended the Django User model in order to have a customized authentication.
And my model class is also called 'User'.
I am successfully using generic views default configuration for all models except for the 'User'.

According to the documentation, the context variable will be inferred from the model name.
But there seems to be an extra context variable called user, that is always present and provides information about the authenticated user, for which I could not find mention in the documentation of 1.5, but is described in 1.2 docs here:
​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/topics/auth/#authentication-data-in-templates

Problem

The following code does not work as expected:

• urls.py

  ...
      url(r'^user/(?P<pk>\d+)/$', DetailView.as_view( model = User ), name = 'user'),
  ...
  

• user_detail.html

  {% if user %}
      <p>id                    : {{ user.id                    }}</p>
      <p>name                  : {{ user.name                  }}</p>
      <p>description           : {{ user.description           }}</p>
      <p>email                 : {{ user.email                 }}</p>
  ...
  

Instead of getting the details for the user with the corresponding pk (user.id) is present in the URL, the authenticated user details are always returned.
There is no warning in the logs about the override, of the user object retrieved from the database, by the authenticated user object within the template context variables namespace.

Workaround

The desired behavior is obtained after changing the context object name from the default 'user' to 'u', as follows:

• urls.py

  ...
      url(r'^user/(?P<pk>\d+)/$', DetailView.as_view( model = User, context_object_name = 'u' ), name = 'user'),
  ...
  

• user_detail.html

  {% if u %}
      <p>id                    : {{ u.id                    }}</p>
      <p>name                  : {{ u.name                  }}</p>
      <p>description           : {{ u.description           }}</p>
      <p>email                 : {{ u.email                 }}</p>
  ...
  

This way I can obtain the details for any given user, by id.

[Matt McClanahan]

I think it's worth adding a mention in the generic views docs that TemplateResponse uses RequestContext by default and linking to ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/ref/templates/api/#subclassing-context-requestcontext which discusses how processors can overwrite existing context variables.

[Zbigniew Siciarz]

Relevant pull request: ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/1085

[Florian Apolloner <florian@…>]

In 0b0741602b18928a418ba4661dc24b880daa5253:

Fixed #20294 -- Documented context processors in TemplateResponseMixin.