Get Username from a Cookie

I use the backend solution from django. I just want to get a username from the cookie or the session_key to get to know the user. How I can do it?

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session

def start(request, template_name="registration/my_account.html"):
    user_id = request.session.get('session_key')
    if user_id:
        name = request.user.username
        return render_to_response(template_name, locals())
    else:
        return render_to_response('account/noauth.html')

Only else is coming up. What am I doing wrong?

Am I right then that authenticated means he is logged in?

--> Okay this I got! Firstly, if you have some clarification to a question, update the question, don't post an answer or (even worse) another question, as you have done. Secondly, if the user is logged out, by definition he doesn't have a username.

I mean the advantage of Cookies is to identify a user again. I just want to place his name on the webpage. Even if he is logged out. Or isnt't it possible?开发者_如何学C

You can check if a user is authenticated by calling the, apptly named, is_authenticated method. Your code would then look somewhat like this:

def start(request, template_name="registration/my_account.html"):
    if request.user.is_authenticated():
        name = request.user.username
        return render_to_response(template_name, locals())
    else:
        return render_to_response('account/noauth.html')

No need to access the session yourself, Django handles all of that automatically (provided you use both django.contrib.sessions and django.contrib.auth).

/edit: in order to have a user's username, he needs to be authenticated. There's no good way around that.

piquadrat has absolutely the right answer, but if for some reason you do need to get the user from the session, you call get_decoded() on the session object:

session_data = request.session.get_decoded()
user_id = session_data['_auth_user_id']

You need to enable the AuthenticationMiddleware and SessionMiddleware in your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting in your settings.py to access request.user in your views.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/topics/auth/#authentication-in-web-requests

You can then access the username using request.user.username