Question

I have a meta class for the Django User model that I use to add extra methods (overly simplified version):

# project.models.pie_lover.py

from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class PieLover(User):
    class Meta:
        app_label = "core"
        proxy = True

    def likes_pie(self):
        return True

In my view, I wish to get the logged in PieLover and see if he likes pie (silly thing to do because a PieLover always loves pie, but in a real world situation this may not be the case). My problem lies in the way Django logs in the users, I use the built-in login(request) function for this and as a result the object stored in request.user is a User object, not a PieLover.

# project.views.like_pie.py

from ..models.pie_lover import PieLover

def index(request):
    pie_lover = request.user

    if pie_lover.likes_pie():
        print "Try pie, try!"
    else:
        print "BLASPHEMER!"

If I try to do this Django tells me that the User object has no method likes_pie which is to be expected as request.user is not a PieLover instance.

As a quick workaround I just get the PieLover which has the same ID as the User but that means an extra DB hit.

How can I make Django use PieLover by default in the request?
I was thinking that instead of making another database query to get the proper PieLover object to create a new PieLover object and pass request.user to it at initialization but I don’t know what the implications of this are.

Answer 1

After poking around I found, what seems to me, the easiest and non-hackish way to access the PieLover methods for a given User instance. I have added this to a custom middleware:

from models.pie_lover import PieLover

class PieLoverMiddleware(object):
    def process_request(self, request):
        request.pie_lover = PieLover(request.user)