Django UserContextMixin

If you want to get the currently logged-in user and use it—e.g at the top of every template, in class-based view it could be hard to achieve.

However there is an easy and pythonic/djangoic way to accomplish that: just use a Mixin. Actually Django framework consists of very wide range of Mixins such as SingleObjectMixin or TemplateResponseMixin. For more detail: Django Class-based Mixins.

So now we can write our very own Mixin to do the job:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from django.views.generic.base import ContextMixin


class UserContextMixin(ContextMixin):
    """Get current `User` from request and add it to context"""

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        # Call the base implementation first to get a context
        context = super().get_context_data(**kwargs)
        user = self.request.user
        context['user'] = user

        return context

Above we inherit our Mixin from built-in ContextMixin class which can be examined below:

class ContextMixin:
    """
    A default context mixin that passes the keyword arguments received by
    get_context_data() as the template context.
    """
    extra_context = None

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        if 'view' not in kwargs:
            kwargs['view'] = self
        if self.extra_context is not None:
            kwargs.update(self.extra_context)
        return kwargs

Then you can inherit it in your Class-based view like below:

from .utils.views import UserContextMixin


class OrderCreateView(UserContextMixin, CreateView):
    template_name = "template.html"
    success_url = reverse_lazy("product:order")
    form_class = OrderModelForm
    extra_context = {'some_detail': 'Some Other Info'}

    …

So now you can use your user context in your view's other attributes. Also you can access it in your templates such as below:

{% extends "app/base_site.html" %}
{% load staticfiles %}

{% block title %} Order {% endblock title %}

{% block content %}
…

User : {{ user }}
User Name : {{ user.name }}

…

{% endblock content %}

Pro Tip: Always inherit your Mixin before Class-based View classes.

All done!