Question

I have the following user flow:

1) user registers.

2) user has a ‘getting_started’ page where he fills out some basic info and adds a picture.

3) user activates his email and logs in

After a user has finished filling out his info on the getting started page, if he goes back to the page getting_started/, I want the user to be redirected to his home/. What would be the easiest way to accomplish this? (As a reference, similar to the LinkedIn or Facebook Sign Up flow).

The way that comes to mind for me is to set a global variable getting_started = 1 after the user fills out the getting_started page, and on the getting_started page, do —

if getting_started: 
    redirect to home/ 
else:
    ...(normal getting started view)...

Answer 1

Is it just the getting_started view/page that you want to redirect on? Don’t think in terms of global variables, think in terms of database fields!

Once your user has signed up, they will be a registered user (if you are using djangos auth app) and they will have an entry in the database. Therefore you simply have to check to see if the user is registered already: if so, redirect, otherwise allow them to continue signing up.

You could simply put a check at the start of the getting_started view to see if the user has already signed up

from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect

def getting_started_view(request):
    if request.user.is_authenticated():
        return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse('home_view'))

where home_view is in your urls.py:

url("...","someapp.views.viewname", name="home_view"),
...

(or you could hard code the redirect)

If you are looking for more complex redirects (maybe numerous pages that require a redirect to the home page) you should look at writing some middleware. This will allow you to intercept every request coming in, see if it’s to a certain page, and redirect.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/middleware/?from=olddocs