How do I check if a user has entered the URL from another website in Django? - django

Question

I want an effect to be applied when a user is entering my website. So therefore I want to check for when a user is coming from outside my website so the effect isnt getting applied when the user is surfing through different urls inside the website, but only when the user is coming from outside my website

Answer 1

You can't really check for where a user has come from specifically. You can check if the user has just arrived on your site by setting a session variable when they load one of your pages. You can check for it before you set it, and if they don't have it, then they have just arrived and you can apply your effect. There's some good examples of how sessions work here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Server-side/Django/Sessions
There's a couple of ways to handle this. If you are using function based views, you can just create a separate util function and include it at the top of every page, eg,
utils.py
def first_visit(request):
"""returns the answer to the question 'first visit for session?'
make sure SESSION_EXPIRE_AT_BROWSER_CLOSE set to False in settings for persistance"""
if request.session['first_visit']:
#this is not the first session because the session variable is used.
return False
else:
#This is the first visit
...#do something
#set the session variable so you only do the above once
request.session[first_visit'] = True
return True
views.py
from utils.py import first_visit
def show_page(request):
first_visit = first_visit(request)
This approach gives you some control. For example, you may not want to run it on pages that require login, because you will already have run it on the login page.
Otherwise, the best approach depends on what will happen on the first visit. If you want just to update a template (eg, perhaps to show a message or run a script on th epage) you can use a context processor which gives you extra context for your templates. If you want to interrupt the request, perhaps to redirect it to a separate page, you can create a simple piece of middleware.
docs for middleware
docs for context processors
You may also be able to handle this entirely by javascript. This uses localStorage to store whether or not this is the user's first visit to the site and displays the loading area for 5 seconds if there is nothing in localStorage. You can include this in your base template so it runs on every page.
function showMain() {
document.getElementByID("loading").style.display = "none";
document.getElementByID("main").style.display = "block";
}
const secondVisit = localStorage.getItem("secondVisit");
if (!secondVisit) {
//show loading screen
document.getElementByID("loading").style.display = "block";
document.getElementByID("main").style.display = "none";
setTimeout(5000, showMain)
localStorage.setItem("secondVisit", "true" );
} else {
showMain()
}