Django user.is_authenticated works some places, not others

Question

In my template, I have the following:

        <ul class="tabbed" id="network-tabs">
            {% if user.is_authenticated %}
            <li><a href="{% url acct-my-profile %}">My Account</a></li>
            <li><a href="{% url acct-logout %}">Log Out</a></li>
            {% else %}
            <li><a href="{% url acct-login %}">Log in</a></li>
            <li><a href="{% url acct-register %}">Register</a></li>
            {% endif %}
        </ul>

It seems to work fine, unless the page been created has a @login_required decorator, in which case the page works fine but the navigation appears as if the user is not logged in, even when they are.

Answer 1

You should check your view function to see where the user variable is coming from. Unless you're specifically passing user into the context from the view, that's your problem.

You do have access to request.user, though, and that will always return true in a template rendered from a view that has the @login_required decorator.

The reason I can tell you for certain that there's nothing wrong with the decorator, though, is that in the code for User and AnonymousUser (located in django.contrib.auth.models) the is_authenticated method strictly returns true for User and false for AnonymousUser. The decorator does not and cannot change that. And what that means is that your template isn't actually getting a User object where you're checking user.

Answer 2

To follow on from Gabriel's answer, is the user variable coming from the auth context processor? If it is, and you are using the render_to_response shortcut, you need to use a RequestContext instance.

from django.template import RequestContext

...

@login_required
def some_view(request):
    # ...
    return render_to_response('my_template.html',
                          my_data_dictionary,
                          context_instance=RequestContext(request))

Apologies if this is barking up the wrong tree.