How to extend User Model in Django

In the previous post, I discussed how you can create a custom User model in Django but what if you don't want to create a custom one.

In that case, You can just extend the User model with a OneToOne model relationship.

• We can easily add another field such as Location, Date of Birth etc.

Create a Django Project

Setup your Virtual environment and create a Django Project.

Note - Set up code is available at previous post.

Extending User Model

Import the User model from "django.contrib.auth.models" and we will create another model which will relate to this User model

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.db.models.base import Model
from django.db.models.deletion import CASCADE
# Create your models here.
class ExtendUser(models.Model):
    r = models.OneToOneField(User,on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    date_of_birth = models.DateField(null=True)
    city = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    def __str__(self):
        return self.r.username

Add this model to the admin.py

Showing Data

Now the question is how we can access this data and show it at the frontend.

It's easy..

In views.py file I have created a single function which will send the data as context.

def home(request):
    data = request.user
    return render(request,'core/index.html',{'data':data})

Now in index.html you can access this data

<p>{{data.username}}</p>
<p>{{data.extenduser.city}}</p>
<p>{{data.extenduser.date_of_birth}}</p>

Cons

• By this method, you can't change the primary login method which is username.

Here is the GitHub repo for the code

kritebh / extend-user-model-django

How to extend User model in Django