Question

I’m working on an online store in Django (just a basic shopping cart right now), and I’m planning to add functionality for users to mark items as favorite (just like in stackoverflow). Models for the cart look something like this:

class Cart(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User)

class CartItem(models.Model):
    cart = models.ForeignKey(Cart)
    product = models.ForeignKey(Product, verbose_name="produs")

The favorites model would be just a table with two rows: user and product.

The problem is that this would only work for registered users, as I need a user object. How can I also let unregistered users use these features, saving the data in cookies/sessions, and when and if they decides to register, moving the data to their user?

I guess one option would be some kind of generic relations, but I think that’s a little to complicated. Maybe having an extra row after user that’s a session object (I haven’t really used sessions in django until now), and if the User is set to None, use that?

So basically, what I want to ask, is if you’ve had this problem before, how did you solve it, what would be the best approach?

Answer 1

I haven’t done this before but from reading your description I would simply create a user object when someone needs to do something that requires it. You then send the user a cookie which links to this user object, so if someone comes back (without clearing their cookies) they get the same skeleton user object.

This means that you can use your current code with minimal changes and when they want to migrate to a full registered user you can just populate the skeleton user object with their details.

If you wanted to keep your DB tidy-ish you could add a task that deletes all skeleton Users that haven’t been used in say the last 30 days.