I'm not sure if this needs to be addressed in the documentation or in the code, but there's a bit of a gotcha in the SingleObjectMixin code, related to the implementation of get_context_data().
The get_context_data() of SingleObjectMixin looks for self.object to attach the retrieved object to the view. However, the object attribute is not actually set anywhere in the SingleObjectMixin. A little digging says that BaseDetailView addresses this by manually setting self.object to self.get_object() in the get() function. However, that mandates the semi-redundant setting of an attribute that may not be used elsewhere, and also requires one of dispatch, get, or post to be defined. None of this is mentioned in the documentation, though after going back I noticed that there's an unexplained self.object = self.get_object() in the documentation for using mixins.
There are a couple potential ways to deal with this, but I think the simplest way is probably this:
def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
"""
Insert the single object into the context dict.
"""
context = {}
try:
obj = self.object
except AttributeError:
obj = self.get_object()
if obj:
context['object'] = obj
context_object_name = self.get_context_object_name(obj)
if context_object_name:
context[context_object_name] = obj
context.update(kwargs)
return super(SingleObjectMixin, self).get_context_data(**context)
I suspect it won't break any existing code, and it'll allow SingleObjectMixin to be used without having to redefine on of the functions that comes before get_context_data() in the chain.
Oops, forgot to set the reporter field. Posting here just in case.