title: How to subclass django's generic CreateView with initial data?
body: <p>I'm trying to create a dialog which uses jquery's .load() function to slurp in a rendered django form. The .load function is passed the pk of the "alert" object. Also available in the class functions are things like <code>self.request.user</code> so I can pre-fill those fields, shown below in the Message model (models.py):</p>
  
  
  
  <pre class="lang-python prettyprint-override"><code>class Message(models.Model):
  
      user = models.ForeignKey(User)
      alert = models.ForeignKey(Alert)
      date = models.DateTimeField()
      message = models.TextField()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Subclassing django's CreateView makes it pretty easy to generate a context with an instance of the ModelForm (views.py):</p>
  
  
  
  <pre class="lang-python prettyprint-override"><code>class MessageDialogView(CreateView):
      """ show html form fragment """
      model = Message
      template_name = "message.html"
  
      def get_initial(self):
          super(MessageDialogView, self).get_initial()
          alert = Alert.objects.get(pk=self.request.POST.get("alert_id"))
          user = self.request.user
          self.initial = {"alert":alert.id, "user":user.id, "message":"test"}
          return self.initial
  
  
      def post(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
          super(MessageDialogView, self).post(request, *args, **kwargs)
          form_class = self.get_form_class()
          form = self.get_form(form_class)
          context = self.get_context_data(form=form)
          return self.render_to_response(context)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem here is that <code>self.initial</code> does not get rendered with the form. I have insured that the form is indeed calling <code>get_initial</code> and the form instance has the proper initial data in <code>post</code>, but when the form is rendered in the template <code>message.html</code> it doesn't grab any of the initial data like I would expect. Is there a special trick to get this to work? I've scoured the docs (seems to be lacking examples on generic based class views) and source  but I can't see what I'm missing.</p>