Django - Foreign Key to User model

django foreign-keys user-registration
Meph picture Meph · Sep 5, 2011 · Viewed 19.9k times · Source

I want to create new model, something like:

user_name = models.ForeignKey(u"Username", User),

but when I try to syncdb, I get this error message:

"AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute '_meta'"

When I look on some tutorials, everything seems to be the same like in my model and problem with "_meta" is never mentioned.

Answer

rgeber picture rgeber · Oct 21, 2015

A safer way to do this is to use the AUTH_USER_MODEL from the settings file.

Example:

from django.db import models
from django.conf import settings

class Article(models.Model):
    headline = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    article = models.TextField()
    author = models.ForeignKey(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)

By default settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL refers to django.contrib.auth.models.User without requiring you to do anything.

The advantage of this approach is that your app will continue to work even if you use a custom user model without modification.

For more information on how to make use of custom user models check out this part of the Django docs

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