Question

In django, I use the authenticate() function to log users in. Using request.user, I can access the logged in user’s information which is pulled from the users table. If I do request.user.id, I can get the user’s id. In any template, on any request, I can do user.username to get the username.

Is there a way by which I can add values to the request.user variable so that I can use them throughout my application and in templates?

For example, I would like to have this: request.user.timezone set when the user logs in to the site; I should be able to access this variable in templates and in my views.

Answer 1

Would you like to let the user change it time-zone and force a specific time-zone ? I assume you would, if so you would like to keep the timezone configurable in your database. Therfore I would suggest you to make a UserProfile model which has one to one relations with the User Object.

You can do :

class UserProfile(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User)
    time_zone = models.whateverField()
    ... add anything else you would like to extend your profile ...

On your templete you will be able to get the timezone by doing that :

{{ request.user.userprofile.time_zone }}

Simple and very clean.

If you would like to have an automatic creation of your userprofile whenever you save a User object, you can use signals for that.