Question

I learned how to authenticate users in Django months ago, but I’ve since upgraded and am having some problems so it occurred to me this morning that I may not have been doing it correctly from the start so I decided to ask.

In my project’s urls.py file I’ve got ^accounts/login/$ and ^accounts/logout/$ both wired up to the built-in login() and logout() views (at django.contrib.auth.views) and ^accounts/profile/$ is connected to a view I’ve written, called “start_here” whose contents are basically this:

def start_here(request):
    if request.user:
        user_obj = request.user
    else:
        user_obj = None
    is_auth = False
    if request.user.is_authenticated():
        is_auth = True
    return render_to_response("profile.html", {'auth': is_auth,'user': user_obj,})

Now, “profile.html” extends a master template, called master.html, inside which is a “navbar” block whose contents are supposed to change if ‘auth’ == True (snippet below)

{% block navbar %}
            {% if auth %}
                <a href="">Link A</a>
                <a href="">Link B</a>
                <a href="">Link C</a>
                <a href="">Link D</a>
                <a href="">Link E</a>
                <a href="">Link F</a>
                <a href="/accounts/logout/">Logout</a>
            {% else %}
                <a href="/accounts/login/">Login</a>
            {% endif %}
{% endblock %}

My problem is that when I log in, and it redirects to /accounts/profile, the navbar doesn’t display Links A-F + Logout, it displays only “login”. It doesn’t work the way I expect it to unless I manually copy-paste the above block into profile.html. When calling render_to_response(), does the context I provide get passed to the parent template as well as the child?

Full source to master and profile.html: http://dpaste.com/hold/128784/
I don’t see anything suspect in the code.

Answer 1

This answer is tangential, but Jim’s suggestion to use RequestContext is so good I want to explicitly explain how to do it.

You can reduce your start_here function to

from django.template import RequestContext

def start_here(request):
    return render_to_response("profile.html", {},
        context_instance=RequestContext(request))

By using RequestContext, user is automatically added to the context. Instead of using

{% if auth %}

use

{% if user.is_authenticated %}