Django: How to write current users name from every view (django) - django

Question

I am writing small social application. One of the features is to write user name in the header of the site. So for example if I am logged in and my name is Oleg (username), then I should see:
Hello, Oleg | Click to edit profile
Otherwise I should see something like:
Hello Please sign-up or join
What I want is to show this on every page of my site. The obvious solution is to pass request.user object into every view of my site. But here http://www.willmer.com/kb/category/django/
I read that I can simply access request object from any template, just by enabling:
TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
'django.core.context_processors.request',
)
Not sure why but it actually didn't work :(
Maybe someone can help me and suggest a solution?
Thanks a lot,
Oleg

Answer 1

Also note that you should use django.core.context_processors.auth instead of django.core.context_processors.request if you don't need the whole request context. Then you can simply type:
Hello {{ user.get_full_name }}
in your template.
Don't forget to pass context_instance=RequestContext(request) when you call render_to_response (or use direct_to_template).

Answer 2

There are probably two issues here.
Firstly, if you redefine TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS as you have done you will override the default, which is probably not a good idea. By default, the setting already includes the auth processor, which gives you a user variable anyway. If you definitely need the request as well you should do this (notice the +=):
TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS += (
'django.core.context_processors.request',
)
Secondly, as described in the documentation here when using context processors you need to ensure that you are using a RequestContext in your template. If you're using render_to_response you should do it like this:
return render_to_response('my_template.html',
my_data_dictionary,
context_instance=RequestContext(request))

Answer 3

Use
from django.template import RequestContext
instead of
from django.template import Context
So now just call RequestContext(request, context)
More here.

Answer 4

Once you have set up the context process, the request is passed to the template as a variable named request. To access the user object within the variable you need to drill into it:
{{ request.user }}
Here is a list of attributes stored in the Django Request object. More specifically, here is the user attribute.

Answer 5

{% if user.is_authenticated %}
<p>Welcome, {{ user.username }}. Thanks for logging in.</p>
{% else %}
<p>Welcome, new user. Please log in.</p>
{% endif %}
Would be enough if you have TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS already set.

Answer 6

I think just by adding locals() can solve the problem.
return render_to_response('my_template.html',
my_data_dictionary,locals())