Question

I would like to create a profile page for every account created. Once created the user profile can be accessed like

http://example.com/username

But before creation I should validate that the url is already available and not taken by existing url patterns. For ex: There will be a page like

http://example.com/about

Now “about” is not a valid user. But it is a valid url pattern. I should be able to prevent a user creation with a name ‘about’. For that I need to check the url patterns in addition to check whether a user with that name already exists. How to do this?

An easy way out would be to have a url pattern like the following for the profile page:
http://example.com/user/username

But I’ve a strong requirement to have profile page like the following
http://example.com/username

Answer 1

You can simply try to resolve the address to a view:

from django.core.urlresolvers import resolve
from myapp.views import user_profile_view

try:
    my_view = resolve("/%s/" % user_name)
    if my_view == user_profile_view:
        # We match the user_profile_view, so that's OK.
    else:
        # oops, we have another view that is mapped on that URL
    # you already have something mapped on this address
except:
    # app doesn't have such path

EDIT:

you can also make the check in a different way:

def user_profile_view(request, user_name):
    # some code here

user_profile_view.name = "User Profile View"

and then the check above could be:

if getattr(my_view, "name", None) == "User Profile View":
    ...