Question

I am trying to track the user – without login. For that I tried using sessionid or django sessions.

View:

# Associating data with sessionid
ob = MyModel(session_key=request.session.session_key, data='abc')
ob.save()

Intention was to save specific data for each browser session.

Raises Error:

# session_key not found

I checked the cookies on the browser, there is only csrftoken.
sessionid was not in the cookie list.

I assumed that the sessionid is maintained no matter what ? But seems like that is not the case.

So, When is sessionid created ? How can I manage session without user login ?

Answer 1

The default behavior is to only populate the session if you access or modify a key in the session dict-like object.

To avoid this behavior set SESSION_SAVE_EVERY_REQUEST to True in your settings.py file. This makes sure that a session is saved on each request, even if you didn’t modify the session object.

The authentication middleware has no bearing on sessions; by default django supports anonymous sessions.