Question

I have figured out how to get my site to say ‘Hello, John’ when the user is logged in, but I can’t figure out how to have it not return the error:

<type 'exceptions.TypeError'>(format requires a mapping)

In regards to this code:

return dict(listings=listings, hello='hello %(first_name)s' % auth.user)

Answer 1

Perhaps your auth.user is None

here is a quick check that it would throw that exception

>>> hello='hello %(first_name)s' % None
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: format requires a mapping

You could try somthing like this

hello = 'hello %(first_name)s %s' % auth.user if auth.user else ''
return dict(listings=listings, hello=hello)