The topic of extending the User model in Django came up recently on Convore. In the discussion I mentioned a minor hack we had come up with at work to reduce the friction of working with user profile models (which are still the safest way to add extra fields to User).
The LazyProfileMiddleware adds a request.profile in the same style as
AuthenticationMiddleware adds a request.user. The only point of warning is
that also like AuthenticationMiddleware, this cannot be enabled for only one
site in a multi-tenant deployment scenario.
class LazyProfileMiddleware(object):
"""Middleware to attach a lazy .profile value to all requests."""
lazy_profile = property(lambda self: self.user.get_profile() if self.user else None)
def process_request(self, request):
request.__class__.profile = self.lazy_profile