How to use a custom user model¶
If you are using Django 1.5 or later, then you can specify a custom user model in your settings. Oscar will dynamically adjust the profile summary view and profile editing form to use the fields from your custom model.
Before Django 1.5, the recommended technique for adding fields to users was to
use a one-to-one “profile” model specified in the AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE
. As
of Django 1.5, this setting is deprecated and will be removed in Django 1.7.
Nevertheless, Oscar continues to support this setting and will add relevant
fields to the profile form. Hence profiles can be used in combination with
custom user models. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Restrictions¶
Oscar does have some requirements on what fields a user model has. For instance, the auth backend requires a user to have an ‘email’ and ‘password’ field.
Oscar 0.6 ships with its own abstract user model that supports the minimum fields and methods required for Oscar to work correctly. New Oscar projects are encouraged to subclass this User model.
Migrations¶
It has previously been suggested to set db_table
of the model to
auth_user
to avoid the migrations from breaking. This issue has been fixed
and migrations are now using AUTH_USER_MODEL
and AUTH_USER_MODEL_NAME
which will use db_table
name of the user model provided by
get_user_model()
.
This works in the instances where you are using the default auth.User
model
or when you use a custom user model from the start. Switching over from
auth.User
to a custom model after having applied previous migration of
Oscar will most likely require renaming the auth_user
table to the new user
table in a manual schemamigration.
Example¶
If you want to use oscar.apps.customer.abstract_model.AbstractUser
which has email
as an index, and want to customize some of the methods on
User
model, say, get_full_name
for Asian names, a simple approach is
to create your own user
module:
# file: your-project/apps/user/models.py
from django.db import models
from oscar.apps.customer.abstract_models import AbstractUser
class User(AbstractUser):
def get_full_name(self):
full_name = '%s %s' % (self.last_name.upper(), self.first_name)
return full_name.strip()
Then adding this user
app to the INSTALLED_APPS
list. Beside that we
need to tell django
to use our customized user model instead of the
default one as the authentication model [1]:
# use our own user model
AUTH_USER_MODEL = "user.User"
After the migration, a database table called user_user
will be created based
on the schema defined inside of
oscar.apps.customer.abstract_models.AbstractUser
.