How to use a custom user model¶
You can specify a custom user model in the AUTH_USER_MODEL
setting.
Oscar will dynamically adjust the account 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
.
While this setting was removed from Django in Django 1.7, Oscar continues to
support it 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 authentication backend requires a user to have an ‘email’ and
‘password’ field. Oscar also assumes that the email
field is unique, as
this is used to identify users.
Oscar 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 migration.
Example¶
If you want to use oscar.apps.customer.abstract_model.AbstractUser
which has email
as an index, and want to customise 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 add this user
app to the INSTALLED_APPS
list. Beside that we
need to tell django
to use our customised 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
.