Question

In my view, I can print request.user.username, however in the template, {{request.user.username}} does not appear. To make this easy, I removed the logic from the function, and I am importing render_to_response & RequestContext.

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.template import RequestContext

@login_required
@csrf_protect
def form(request):
    print request.user.username
    data = {}
    return render_to_response('form.html', data, context_instance=RequestContext(request))   

My guess is that I have problem with my settings.py.

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
    # Uncomment the next line for simple clickjacking protection:
    # 'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.admindocs',
    'src',
)

Thanks in advance for your help-

Answer 1

As mentioned in the documentation, authenticated user’s object is stored within user variable in templates. Mentioned documentation includes the following example:

When rendering a template RequestContext, the currently logged-in user, either a User instance or an AnonymousUser instance, is stored in the template variable {{ user }}:

{% if user.is_authenticated %}
    <p>Welcome, {{ user.get_username }}. Thanks for logging in.</p>
{% else %}
    <p>Welcome, new user. Please log in.</p>
{% endif %}

EDIT: Thanks to @buffer, who dug out this old answer, I have updated it with most recent state. When it was originally written, in less than a month after Django 1.4 (which was released at the end of March 2012), it was correct. But since Django 1.5, proper method to get username is to call get_username() on user model instance. This has been added due to ability to swap User class (and have custom field as username).