Re: Can anyone give me a suggestion or a recommendation as to how I can access the current user's username in the models.py?

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 5:24 AM, Shawn Milochik <shawn@milochik.com> wrote:

I've repeatedly asked about this over the past couple of years and
there seems to be no "right" answer." This, to me, is the biggest flaw
in Django.

There's definitely a right answer. 

 

The official (and useless) answer is that you must pass "user" in
everywhere you save anything. This is stupid, obviously, because you
can not rewrite every third-party app to support this (among other
reasons).

Can someone please explain to my why it is "stupid" that a function should accept as an argument everything that it needs to perform it's job? This is basic algorithm design, not black magic.

I'm utterly amazed that for some reason, when it comes to web programming, global variables have somehow become acceptable. Because that's what a thread local is - a global variable. 

I can't speak for anyone else, but my first year university curriculum pointed out why global variables shouldn't be used. 20-odd years of software development experience has reinforced this understanding. 

Django itself uses thread locals in a couple of internal components, and let me tell you from experience -- every single one of them causes a world of hurt when you start trying to debug edge cases, or when you're trying to implement tests of functionality. If my time machine was working, I'd be jumping back in time to purge every last use of thread locals from Django's codebase. 

 

There was a good tutorial for using threadlocals on the
official Django wiki but someone deleted it in a fit of spite a few
years ago.

No - there was *a* tutorial several years ago, and it was deleted because members of the core team got tired of jumping into every conversation where it was referenced to chime in, yet again, that it was bad practice, with a whole bunch of potential security implications.

Fixing these problems the right way requires some planning. But for me, "it's harder to do this properly" isn't a compelling reason to bugger up your system architecture.

If a third party app doesn't provide a way to pass in the user object, then *fix the damn third party app*. This is open source, after all, and an inability to pass in relevant parameters to an operation is a bug (or at least a missing feature).

And if there's somewhere that Django doesn't do a good job about making it easy to pass around relevant parameters, *suggest an improvement*. I can think of a couple of places in the forms library where there is obvious room for improvement (possible to work around at present, but not as elegant as a baked-in solution).

Yours,

Russ Magee %-)

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