Question

I authenticate the user in this view:

def note_edit_auth(request):
        if request.method == 'POST':
                form = EditAuthForm(request.POST)
                if form.is_valid():
                        email = form.cleaned_data['email']
                        password = form.cleaned_data['password']
                        user = auth.authenticate(username = email, password = password)

                        if user and user.is_authenticated():
                                request.session['email'] = email
                                request.session['password'] = password
                                request.session['user'] = user
                                return HttpResponseRedirect('/note_edit')
                        else:
                                return HttpResponse('User or password is either incorrect or does not exist.')

And it works. user is indeed authenticated. So then I try to access request.user from another view where the above view redirects to like this:

def note_edit(request):
        if request.method == 'POST' and request.user.is_authenticated():
                form_edit = EditForm(request.POST)
                user = request.session['email']
                auth.logout(request)
                return HttpResponse('Done!')
        elif request.method == 'GET' and request.user.is_authenticated():
                form_edit = EditForm(irrelevantfoofoo)
        else:
                return HttpResponse('User not authenticated.')
        return render_to_response('editnote.htm', {'form': form_edit}, context_instance = RequestContext(request))

And suddenly I get the response that user is not authenticated. When I tried printing request.user to console it is showing as AnonymousUser. And I kid you not this was working fine last night. Today I wake up, make some changes and it starts misbehaving. I revert all changes and it still misbehaves.

Why is this happening and how do I fix it?

Answer 1

auth.authenticate() just checks if the provided user credentials are valid.
To actually log the user in you have to use login().