Question

We use paypal on our system to check whether a user has paid before and already has an account.
This morning I received a traceback that basically gave me an integrity error.

IntegrityError: (1062, “Duplicate entry ‘user_1234_before’ for key 2”)

My statemtent looks as follows.

try:
    user = User.objects.get(email=ipn_obj.payer_email)
except:
    user_slug = ("%s_%s_before") % (ipn_obj.first_name, ipn_obj.last_name)
    username = slugify(user_slug)
    user = User.objects.create_user(username, ipn_obj.payer_email, 'testpassword')
    user.first_name = ipn_obj.first_name
    user.last_name = ipn_obj.last_name
    user.save()

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Never, ever use a blank except statement. What’s happening here is an excellent demonstration of why.

You’ve presumably used that try/except block to catch the User.DoesNotExist exception. However, your code is actually raising a completely different exception. Because you’re swallowing it, it’s impossible to know which one, but potentially ipn_obj isn’t what you think it is and doesn’t have a payer_email error, so you’re getting AttributeError. Or, possibly, you’re getting the User.MultipleObjectReturned exception.

Change your except to except User.DoesNotExist, and then debug your actual problem.