How to extend the django User model?

Question

I'm trying to implement the Users class from django.contrib.auth.models like this:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User


class Registration(models.Model):
    '''Represents a user registration.'''
    user              = models.ForeignKey(User)
    registration_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True, help_text='The date of the registration')

    def __str__(self):
        return '%s - %s' % (self.user, self.registration_date,)

This user have two attributes enabled by default: username, password

screenshoot

Reading at the code I can see that there are more attributes, like name and email.

How can I enable those hidden (if this is correct) attributes?

ostergaard · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-24 13:43:44Z

6

First, these attributes are not hidden. Assuming you have "django.contrib.auth" and "django.contrib.contenttypes" in your INSTALLED_APPS, then you have access to the User model as it is defined in your link. See here for the documentation on how to use/access it.

However, since you specified extending the User model, I expect you wanted to add some of your own fields to it (even though your example registration_date exists and is accessible via myuser.date_joined).

The older, more stable and more common way of doing this is similar to what you have. The only difference is to use a OneToOneField(User) instead of a ForeignKey(User). This makes the relationship bidirectional and more convenient by forcing one. You do need to make sure and create a Registration object for every User created.

In fact, there is an example of exactly what you want in the docs for the OneToOneField.

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class Registration(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User)
    registration_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

>>> user = User.objects.get(pk=1)
>>> registration = Registration.objects.create(user=user)
>>> user.registration.registration_date
# Should give the current time
>>> user.get_full_name()
# Should also have all those *hidden* attributes linked above

As of Django 1.5, you can use your own custom User model fairly easily. The documentation for this feature is here. If you are just adding some extra fields, then you can subclass the User model and add your own fields.

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractUser

class MyUser(AbstractUser):
    # We inherit all those nifty things from AbstractUser
    registration_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

Then enable it in your settings.py by adding AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'myapp.MyUser'. We now have to access the user model a little differently

>>> from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model()
>>> Users = get_user_model()
>>> user = Users.objects.get(pk=1)
>>> user.registration_date
# Should give the current time
>>> user.get_full_name()
# Should have those 'hidden' attributes

All this is available under extending and substituting the User model in the documentation.

edited Sep 24, 2016 at 13:43

ostergaard

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answered Jan 12, 2014 at 3:08

kalhartt

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2 Comments

Lucio Over a year ago

But who can I enter those attributes from the Add a New User form? For instance, you can see in my screenshoot that I only can enter a username and password, but I want to use name, email and others too. This attributes are on the default models, so I don't want to overwrite them.

kalhartt Over a year ago

@Lucio I see, your question is about extending the django admin form. Take a look at the full-example at the bottom here, particularly where it says "the following code would be required in the app's admin.py file". I'll update my post when I get time to test it.

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