Question

i want to authenticate users using firstname and lastname

This is the code i am using

user = auth.authenticate(first_name=firstname,last_name=lastname,password=password)

it keep coming up with NoneType: None

i have checked the firstname and lastname plus password seen to be correct?

what i am doing wrong? thanks

Answer 1

The difficulty here is that normally you’d handle this by creating a custom authentication backend that implements authenticate and get_user. However, the function signature for authenticate is:

def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None):

Everywhere in Django that would be calling this will be passing only 2 parameters, username and password. This means that using any of the generic authentication forms and things like the admin interface will break if this is done any other way.

The only work around I could see, and this is kind of sketchy, is if the username were to be typed as a single entry with a string “First Last” (delimited by a space) in place of the username. You could then separate it out and use that value…

(this is all untested, but you get the idea)

class FirstLastNameBackend(object):
    def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None):
        first, last = username.split(' ', 1)
        try:
            user = User.objects.get(first_name=first, last_name=last)
            if user:
                # Check if the password is correct
                # check if the user is active
                # etc., etc.
                return user
        except:
            pass
        return None

    def get_user(self, user_id):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(pk=user_id)
        except:
            return None

The django doc provides a lot of helpful details on doing a custom backend: User auth with custom backend

On a side note, something to be careful of is last names that have a space(s) in them, like “de la Cruz”. If you specify 1 for maxsplit on the split function, you’ll avoid this problem.