Django - doing work as another user - django

Question

I'm using celery and would like to drive sessions on behalf of the user who submitted the request rather than the "root" user. For example a basic task looks like this (a very contrived example)
#task
def process_checklist(**kwargs):
log = process_checklist.get_logger()
document = kwargs.get('document', None)
company = kwargs.get('company', None)
user = kwargs.get('user', None)
object = Book.object.get_or_create(name=kwargs.get('name'))
There are tradeoffs to doing this but I feel it would be far more beneficial to actually use the views to do this, very similar to how we test things.. Practially speaking this is used for batch uploading of data, where each row is effectively a CreateView.
client = Client()
client.login(user='foo', password='bar')
client.post(reverse('create_book_view', data=**kwargs))
But I can't think of a good way to practically use (if it's possible) the django.test.client Client class to log a user in without knowing the password and fill in a view for them. I thought of this but I'm sure there is a better way??
Here is what I came up with?
class AxisClient(Client):
# The admin account is created by us. Once that is done everything should be tested through
# the system.
def login_user(self, username):
"""
Sets the Factory to appear as if it has successfully logged into a site.
Returns True if login is possible; False if the provided credentials
are incorrect, or the user is inactive, or if the sessions framework is
not available.
"""
user = User.objects.get(username=username)
user.backend = None
if user and user.is_active \
and 'django.contrib.sessions' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
engine = import_module(settings.SESSION_ENGINE)
# Create a fake request to store login details.
request = HttpRequest()
if self.session:
request.session = self.session
else:
request.session = engine.SessionStore()
login(request, user)
# Save the session values.
request.session.save()
# Set the cookie to represent the session.
session_cookie = settings.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME
self.cookies[session_cookie] = request.session.session_key
cookie_data = {
'max-age': None,
'path': '/',
'domain': settings.SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN,
'secure': settings.SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE or None,
'expires': None,
}
self.cookies[session_cookie].update(cookie_data)
return True
else:
return False

Answer 1

This appears to work!
class AxisClient(Client):
# The admin account is created by us. Once that is done everything should be tested through
# the system.
def login_user(self, username):
"""
Sets the Factory to appear as if it has successfully logged into a site.
Returns True if login is possible; False if the provided credentials
are incorrect, or the user is inactive, or if the sessions framework is
not available.
"""
user = User.objects.get(username=username)
user.backend = None
if user and user.is_active \
and 'django.contrib.sessions' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
engine = import_module(settings.SESSION_ENGINE)
# Create a fake request to store login details.
request = HttpRequest()
if self.session:
request.session = self.session
else:
request.session = engine.SessionStore()
login(request, user)
# Save the session values.
request.session.save()
# Set the cookie to represent the session.
session_cookie = settings.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME
self.cookies[session_cookie] = request.session.session_key
cookie_data = {
'max-age': None,
'path': '/',
'domain': settings.SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN,
'secure': settings.SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE or None,
'expires': None,
}
self.cookies[session_cookie].update(cookie_data)
return True
else:
return False