How to avoid username clashing with a large number of users in django?

Question

I have an application that will handle a big number of users. The users are divided into 2 types: public and private. Furthermore the private users are comprised of two different companies (maybe even more in the future) and already have established usernames from a LDAP & active directories that will be used to pre-populate my application's user model. To avoid name clashes I'm thinking about implementing username namespaces by using a prefix.

for example:

• _company1_user1
• _company2_user1
• _web_user1

I would like to implement this if possible by using django's user model application. Perhaps by inheriting and overriding the standard methods and adding a namespace argument.

Answer 1

I would suggest using their email address as the username to uniquely identify them.