Django: use custom class for request.user?

Question

I've extended Django's default user class like this:

class CustomUser(User):
 friends = models.ManyToManyField('self', symmetrical=False)

But now I want to use that everywhere instead of the default User class. In my view methods, I have access to request.user but that's an instance of the User class. What's the easiest way to make it return a CustomUser instead?

Answer 1

I think the quickest solution to your problem would simply be to call CustomUser.objects.get(user=user) (this is assuming user is an attribute in your CustomUser model. What I would do is the following:

class CustomUser(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User, unique=True)

So when you get a queryset of CustomUsers, you can filter out the one you want based on using a filter of your user at the request.

Otherwise you can modify the middleware to include CustomUsers instead of users, but I'm not sure exactly how to do that ;)

EDIT: Mark mentioned to me that he would prefer to use inheritence so hes able to use all the custom methods of User, which makes sense and so I found an article to fix this problem nicely.

Here it is.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if you can do that exactly, but you can access your CustomUser attributes using the Django user_profile feature.

In your settings.py:

AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE = 'myapp.CustomUser'

In your view:

user_friends = user.get_profile().friends

Check out this link for more info.

Answer 3

It is all explained here. request.user problem was solved by using an authentication backend. I implemented a custom user according to the author's instructions and have been happy ever since.

Answer 4

you can also "monkey patch" the existing User model somewhere in your models.py and it should just work. In your code just keep using the original class.

User.add_to_class('friends',models.ManyToManyField('self', symmetrical=False))