Django: 1 view for different users?

Question

In my project, I'd like to split pages between a side menu and a content page. I'd like to show a sidemenu which is different for user types (there are 5 user types, so there will be 5 sidemenus). But sometimes, the content page to display can be the same for these 5 user types.

I was looking for a "pattern" to handle this, I thought about one, but never seen it in another project. I'd like you to tell me if it's a good or bad practice:

• 1 URI for all user types (eg. /myapp/display_home)
• In views.py, 1 view for all user types. Into the view, I try to know if the user is logged in, and then which type of user we are dealing with. Then, redirect to the HTML, passing in context a variable containing the user type.
• In the end, in the template, something like this:

Example of template:

{% if user_type == "anonymous" %}
    <!-- display anonymous sidemenu here -->
{% elif user_type == "landlord" %}
    <!-- display landlord sidemenu here -->
{% endif %}

<-- Here is the same content for all user types -->

Do you have any suggestion? another pattern to propose?

Answer 1

I don't know if it is good style. But you could use

{% include user_type_sidemenu_template with arg1=... %}

in your template and provide different templates for the sidemenu for each user_type. You can then set the template variable user_type_sidemenu_template to the corresponding template name in your view.

Answer 2

Check this answer for discussion on user.is_authenticated. You can also check within the view to see who the user is (see here) and modify the context being sent to the template accordingly. Another option would be to modify your view to simply show different types of users different templates.

Lots of ways to accomplish this, not sure if there's a "correct" one.

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Your comment made me realize that this is exactly what the Groups feature of the auth package is for. You can assign users to groups, query whether they're a member of the group, and then show content based on that. I apologize that I don't have time to write out sample code, but there's tons of stuff here on SO about it; hopefully that's a good starting point for you.