Django users and authentication from external source
- by Boldewyn
I have a Django app that gets it's data completely from an external source (queried via HTTP). That is, I don't have the option for a local database. Session data is stored in the cache (on my development server I use a SQLite database, so that is no error source). I'm using bleeding edge Django 1.1svn.
Enter the problem: I want to use Django's own authentication system for the users.
It seems quite simple to write my own Authentication Backend, but always just under the condition that you have a local database where to save the users. Without database my main problem is persistence.
I tried it with the following (assume that datasource.get() is a function that returns some kind of dict):
class ModelBackend (object):
"""Login backend."""
def authenticate (self, username=None, password=None):
"""Check, if a given user/password combination is valid"""
data = datasource.get ('login', username, password)
if data and data['ok']:
return MyUser (username=username)
else:
raise TypeError
return None
def get_user (self, username):
"""get data about a specific user"""
try:
data = datasource.get ('userdata', username)
if data and data['ok']:
return data.user
except:
pass
return None
class MyUser (User):
"""Django user who isn't saved in DB"""
def save (self):
return None
But the intentionally missing save() method on MyUser seems to break the session storage of a login.
How should MyUser look like without a local database?
