django username in url, instead of id

Question

in a mini virtual community, i have a profile_view function, so that i can view the profile of any registered user. The profile view function has as a parameter the id of th

Answer 1

Here's how I do it using class based generic views and the use of slugs. It's surprisingly easy and requires only a few lines of code with the help of slugs.

# accounts/views.py
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.views.generic.detail import DetailView

class UserProfileView(DetailView):
    model = User
    slug_field = "username"
    template_name = "userprofile.html"

# accounts/urls.py
from views import UserProfileView
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # By user ID
    url(r'^profile/id/(?P\d+)/$', UserProfileView.as_view()),
    # By username
    url(r'^profile/username/(?P[\w.@+-]+)/$', UserProfileView.as_view()),
)

Now you can access both the user like accounts/profile/id/123/ as well as accounts/profile/username/gertvdijk/.

What's happening here?

• The usually required pk URL parameter is omitted and replaced by slug in the URL pattern. This is accepted by the view, because...
• The slug parameter is being used by the DetailView (or any other SingleObjectMixin-based view) to find the object on User.username by the use of model = User and slug_field = "username". (docs)
• Because a slug field is optional, the view is also happily serving using just the pk parameter.