Make UpdateView accept an encrypted pk in urls.py and return a model object for editing after decrypting the pk

Question

I have a simple working class based view inheriting UpdateView.

class UpdateModel(UpdateView):
    model = ModelName
    fields = ['field_1' , 'field_2' , ]
    template_name_suffix = '_update_form'
    success_url = reverse_lazy('home')

and the url that maps back to this view

url(r'^edit/(?P<pk>[\w-]+)$' , UpdateModel.as_view() , name="update_model"),

Now the issue I'm facing is that I usually encrypt the PK value before sending it outside(since they are sensitive). When I receive them back, I decrypt them to get the Model Object.

Brief working of encryption process.

def pk_encoder(pk):
    int_pk = int(pk)
    hashids = Hashids("MySalt")
    encoded_pk = hashids.encode(pk_id)
    return encoded_pk

ans similarly I use hashids.decode('string') to obtain my Model Object.

But in UpdateView there is no provision for this(that I know of). In urls.py it simply accepts the pk id to return the relevant form for updating a model. I understand that I have to override UpdateView or any of it's function in some way but can't figure out how. May I know how to edit this functionality of UpdateView

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It was a simple tweak. After reading the source code, here , I found that I simply had to extend the functionality of

def get_object(self)

which is declared in SingleObjectMixin(ContextMixin) class.

The code looks something like,

class UpdateModels(UpdateView):
    #declare model, fields, template_name etc.

    def get_object(self):
        #decode and get the object in the variable desired_model_object 
        return desired_model_object

Hope this helps someone.