Redirecting Django built-in login View to a URL taking user's pk as argument

Question

I am trying to redirect to a URL taking user's pk as argument after successful log-in using Django's built-in login view.

Instead of dynamic {{ next }} variable in my login.html I have a generic landing view of logged-in users;

<input type="submit" value="login" />
<input type="hidden" name="next" value="{% url 'userredirect' %}" />

In my urls.py I have;

url(r'^users/', views.users, name='userredirect'),
url(r'^(?P<pk>\d+)/', UserHome.as_view(), name='userhome'),

and in my views.py I have

@login_required
def users(request):
    url = reverse('userhome', kwargs={'pk':request.user.id})
    return HttpResponseRedirect(url)

What I am doing here is redirect to a detail view that I have named UserHome on the user model after successful login using 2 redirects as I do not know of a way to redirect to UserHome directly (it takes user's pk as argument). It works and I indeed get redirected to the user's homepage when checking via the browser.

Reference;

The "next" parameter, redirect, django.contrib.auth.login

But when running the below test

    def test_page_redirects_to_user_home_on_login(self):
    """
    Test to assure that the login page redirects to the user's
    home page
    """
    username = "someusername"
    password = "somepassword"
    user = User.objects.create_user(username=username,
                password=password)
    user.save()
    response = self.client.post(reverse("userlogin"),
                                {"username":username,
                                 "password":password},
                                follow=True)
    assert response.path == self.client.get(reverse("userhome", 
                                                    kwargs={"pk":user.id}
                                               )
                                       )

I get the below failure

AttributeError: 'HttpResponseNotFound' object has no attribute 'path'

It seems the test client gets no page. Would it be that I am using the userredirect view simply for redirecting and the client do not go ahead and get the UserHome class view to its context.

I'm a newbie to Django/Python. Someone please sort this out for me :).

I look forward either to a way where I can redirect directly from the template for login view to UserHome or a way to rewrite my test.

Answer 1

Hard to say without much more insight in your project. Here are a few possibilities and such.

Response has no path

response indeed has no path, you probably wanted this:

assert response.wsgi_request.path == reverse("userhome", kwargs={"pk":user.id})

Include next in your test

You're simulating data from the login form, but you're omitting the next field. Add it to the POSTed data:

{"username":username,
"password":password,
"next": '/users/',}

Take a look what's in the response

It might help to see what's in the response in your test. For example:

print(response.redirect_chain)

Perhaps you're not even reaching the login page?

Are you missing LOGIN_URL in your settings.py?

LOGIN_URL = '/login/'

Without it, you'll be redirected to '/accounts/login/', which might be the 404 you're seeing.

---

Finaly - why? :)

Perhaps you have some special use case, but I'd usually read user's id (a.k.a. pk) from request.user. That way I (for example) can't access example.com/<your_id> and access your homepage. Of course, that might be just what you intend. In that case I'd still have a separate URL for current user, it will probably pay off later. Something like this:

    ...
    url(r'^/', UserHome.as_view(), name='userhome'),
    url(r'^(?P<pk>\d+)/', UserHome.as_view(), name='userhome'),
    ...)



class UserHome(DetailView):  # also protect with some LoginRequiredMixin
    model = User

    def get_object(self, queryset=None):
        if queryset is None:
            queryset = self.get_queryset()
        id = self.kwargs.get('pk', self.request.user.id)
        return queryset.filter(id=id).get()

Answer 2

First things first: The error you get is because the line

response = self.client.post(reverse("userlogin"),
                                {"username":username,
                                 "password":password},
                                follow=True)

raises a 404 error, hence resonse is a HttpResponseNotFound. Before testing anything else is it a good practice to first test that your request was successful. Something along the line of:

self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)

Also, you are hard-coding url's which goes against DRY and is often the source for trouble (maybe it is the case here). It would be better to name all your urls:

url(r'^users/', views.users, name='user_redirect'),

and then use this in your template

<input type="hidden" name="next" value="{% url 'user_redirect' %}" />

and this in your view

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
@login_required
def users(request):
    url = reverse('userhome', kwargs={'pk': request.user.id})
    return HttpResponseRedirect(url)

And finally, you are taking an unnecessary step with the redirect. Assuming UserHome is a DetailView on User, you could have this code:

##urls.py
url(r'^users/', UserHome.as_view(), name='userhome')

##views.py
from django.views.generic import DetailView
from django.utils.decorators import method_decorator
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
from django.contrib.auth.models import User


class UserHome(DetailView):
    model = User

    def get_object(self, queryset=None):
        return self.request.user

    @method_decorator(login_required)
    def dispatch(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return super(UserHome, self).disatch(*args, **kwargs)

This would also ensure that no user accesses another user's "userhome".

Doing all this should help you find what went wrong with your code. Good luck!