Usage

The package works by creating temporary user accounts based on a user’s session key whenever a flagged view is requested. You can specify which views trigger this behaviour using the lazysignup.decorators.allow_lazy_user decorator.

When an anonymous user requests such a view, a temporary user account will be created for them, and they will be logged in. The user account will have an unusable password set, so that it can’t be used to log in as a regular user. The way to tell a regular use from a temporary user is to call the is_lazy_user() function from lazysignup.templatetags.lazysignup_tags. If this returns True, then the user is temporary. Note that user.is_anonymous() will return False and user.is_authenticated() will return True. See below for more information on is_lazy_user.

A view is provided to allow such users to convert their temporary account into a real user account by providing a username and a password.

A Django management command is provided to clear out stale, unconverted user accounts - although this depends on your use of database-backed sessions, and assumes that all user accounts with an expired session are safe to delete. This may not be the case for all apps, so you may wish to provide your own cleaning script.

The allow_lazy_user decorator

Use this decorator to indicate that accessing the view should cause anonymous users to have temporary accounts created for them.

For example:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from lazysignup.decorators import allow_lazy_user

@allow_lazy_user
def my_view(request):
  return HttpResponse(request.user.username)

When accessing the above view, a very simple response containing the generated username will be displayed.

The require_lazy_user and require_nonlazy_user decorators

It is also possible to mark views as requiring only a lazily-created user, or requiring only a non-lazy user, with the require_lazy_user and require_nonlazy_user decorators respectively. These decorators take arguments and keyword arguments which are passed verbatim to Django’s own redirect view.

The is_lazy_user template filter

This template filter (which can also be imported from lazysignup.utils and used in your own code) will return True if the user is a generated user. You need to pass it the user to test. For example, a site navigation template might look like this:

{% load i18n lazysignup_tags %}

<nav id="account-bar">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="{% url home %}">{% trans "Home" %}</a></li>
    {% if not user|is_lazy_user %}
      <li><a href="#">{% trans "Account" %}</a></li>
      <li><a href="{% url auth_logout %}">{% trans "Log out" %}</a></li>
    {% else %}
      <li><a href="{% url lazysignup_convert %}">{% trans "Save your data" %}</a> {% trans "by setting a username and password" %}</li>
    {% endif %}
  </ul>
</nav>

This filter is very simple, and can be used directly in view code, or tests. For example:

from lazysignup.utils import is_lazy_user

def testIsLazyUserAnonymous(self):
    user = AnonymousUser()
    self.assertEqual(False, is_lazy_user(user))

Note that as of version 0.6.0, the user tested no longer needs to have been authenticated by the LazySignupBackend for lazy user detection to work.

User agent blacklisting

The middleware will not create users for certain requests from blacklisted user agents. This is simply a fairly crude method for preventing many spurious users being created by passing search engines.

The blacklist is specified with the USER_AGENT_BLACKLIST setting. This should be an iterable of regular expression strings. If the user agent string of a request matches a regex (search() is used, so the match can be anywhere in the string) then a user will not be created.

If the list is not specified, then the default is as follows

• slurp
• googlebot
• yandex
• msnbot
• baiduspider

Specifying your own USER_AGENT_BLACKLIST will replace this list.

Using the convert view

Users will be able to visit the /convert/ view. This provides a form with a username, password and password confirmation. As long as they fill in valid details, their temporary user account will be converted into a real user account that they can log in with as usual.

You may specify your own form class into the convert view in order to customise user creation. The code requires expects the following:

• It expects to be able to create the form passing in the generated User object with an instance kwarg (in general, this is fine when using a ModelForm based on the User model)
• It expects to be able to call save() on the form to convert the user to a real user
• It expects to be able to call a get_credentials() method on the form to obtain a set of credentials to authenticate the new user with. The result of this call should be a dictionary suitable for passing to django.contrib.auth.authenticate(). Typically, this would be a dict with username and password keys - but this may vary if you’re using a different authentication backend.

The default configuration, using the provided UserCreationForm, should be enough for most users, but the customisation point is there if you need it.

To specify your own form, set the LAZYSIGNUP_CUSTOM_USER_CREATION_FORM setting to your settings file like so:

LAZYSIGNUP_CUSTOM_USER_CREATION_FORM = 'myproject.apps.myapp.forms.MyForm'

The view also supports template_name and ajax_template_name arguments, to specify templates to render in web and ajax contexts respectively.

The converted signal

Whenever a temporary user account is converted into a real user account, the lazysignup.signals.converted signal will be sent. If you need to do any processing when an account is converted, you should listen for the signal, eg:

from lazysignup.signals import converted
from django.dispatch import receiver

@receiver(converted)
def my_callback(sender, **kwargs):
    print "New user account: %s!" % kwargs['user'].username

The signal provides a single argument, user, which contains the newly-converted User object.