Welcome to django-profiletools’s documentation!

About

The lazy loading of profiles was inspired by the rather incredible Noah Kantrowitz.

Features

  • Lazy loading of your authenticated profile record across the request object lifetime. That means in the Python code and the templates.
  • Name your profile model anything you want in settings.AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE.
  • Prebuilt views and forms to go along with your custom profile model.

Installation

Get the code:

pip install django-profiletools

Install the middleware and context_processor in your settings.py:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
        ...
    'profiletools.context_processors.fetch_profile',
)

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
...
'profiletools.middleware.LazyProfileMiddleware',
)

Also in settings.py, set the AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE to your profile model:

AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE = "profiles.Profile"

Based on that, your profile model should resemble something like:

# profiles.models.Profile.py
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.db import models

class Profile(models.Model):

    user = models.OneToOneField(User)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.user.username

Note

If you don’t use profiles.models.Profile, say members.models.UserProfile go ahead and change the AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE to “members.UserProfile”.

Usage

In your templates:

{{ request.my_profile }}

In your functional views:

profile = request.my_profile

In your class-based views:

profile = self.request.my_profile

Call my_profile as many times as you want, it only loads once. So if you call it 100 times in a view, the SQL SELECT is only done the first time. If no user is found then the my_profile call result is None, which makes it easier to handle templates which need to be able to handle unauthenticated users (like the about page).

Note

If you are using the members.UserProfile example, you’ll need to call that by using request.my_userprofile.

Problems with Python’s “is” evaluation and “type” built-in

If you use the is evaluation before doing anything else with the my_profile object, it will behave in a slightly unexpected manner:

The will always return false. For example:

>>> print(request.my_profile is None)
False
>>> p = request.user.get_profile()
>>> print(request.my_profile is p)
False

Also, the type built-in will return a django.utils.functional.SimpleLazyObject object:

>>> print(type)
<class 'django.utils.functional.SimpleLazyObject'>

Keep in mind what is placed in the my_profile value is not a ModelClass instance or None object, but rather a django.utils.functional.SimpleLazyObject.

How to evaluate the my_profile object

Use == to evaluate the my_profile object. This forces the object to be evaluated and won’t return frustrating false-positives.

Indices and tables