Use any model at run-time with a DetailView in Django.

Django’s Class Based Views (CBVs) are generally great. I ended up in a situation at work recently where I wanted to keep using DetailView, but change which model was used depending on which user was logged in and making this request to the view class.

A few weeks ago, I had left this task incomplete with a TODO marker. On Friday, I was playing catch-up on some of these TODOs. I noticed something interesting.

The sauce.

While looking through the Django source code, I noticed that the DetailView class does not expect a model property to be specified. It does not throw an error if the property is left unspecified.

What this means is one could override a couple of methods and conditionally return a DetailView for whatever object/instance you desire, regardless of the model.

• get_object(self, queryset=None)
  Since we have not specified a model, we need to tell Django how to process the slug and a pk URL keyword.
• get_queryset(self)
  Since we do not have a model property specified, Django should complain automatically if this method is not overridden by you. Here, you return a QuerySet — by default, Django tries to find the default model manager and return its all() query. You could do something similar.

Using this awareness, I was able to do exactly what I needed. I have not included any code snippets since this is not targeted towards complete beginners. However, if you’re reading this and would like a snippet or two, please write me an email.