Question

Forgive me if this has been asked repeatedly, but I couldn’t find an example of this anywhere.

I’m struggling to understand how to share code among view functions in Django. For example, I want to check if the user is authenticated in many views. If they’re not, I’d like to log some information about that request (IP address, etc.) then display a canned message about needing authentication.

Any advice on how to accomplish this?

Answer 1

This is probably best accomplished by creating a utils.py file, rather than a view. Views that don’t return an HTTPResponse object are not technically valid.

See: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial03/#write-views-that-actually-do-something

“Each view is responsible for doing one of two things: Returning an HttpResponse object containing the content for the requested page, or raising an exception such as Http404.” … “All Django wants is that HttpResponse. Or an exception.”

Heroku will throw an error if the view does not return an HttpResponse.

What I usually do in this instance is write a function in a separate file called utils.py and import it and use it from the application files that need it.

from utils import check_login

def view1(request):
     check_login(request)  
     pass  
def view2(request):
     check_login(request)  
     pass