Document CallableBool comparison restriction for User.is_authenticated / is_anonymous

[Tobi]

I have just run into the issue described in https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/26988, trying to check identity rather then equality on User.is_authenticated.

The ​documentation for this attribute is misleading. It implies that that is_authenticated is True for authenticated users, while in reality the attribute has to be called or checked for equality (==) :

Read-only attribute which is always True (as opposed to AnonymousUser.is_authenticated which is always False).

I suggest to add a notice/warning to the documentation, that use of *is* / identity checking is not yet supported. There's a similar warning in the deprecation notice for User.is_authenticated() ​here, but neither the warning nor the deprecation notice can be found in the documentation for contrib.auth.models.User.is_authenticated

[Tim Graham]

It's more Python to write if request.user.is_authenticated: or if not request.user.is_authenticated: rather than == True but a note wouldn't hurt.

[Tobi]

Replying to Tim Graham:

It's more Python to write if request.user.is_authenticated: or if not request.user.is_authenticated: rather than == True but a note wouldn't hurt.

True, == True: is less Python, but this one does actually work. The problem is that if request.user.is_authenticated is True: and if request.user.is_authenticated: yield different results:

>>> AnonymousUser().is_authenticated is True
False
>>> AnonymousUser().is_authenticated is False
False
>>> if AnonymousUser().is_authenticated:
...    print('Authed')
...
>>>

So different to the documentation is_authenticated is not an attribute which *is* always True (or False for AnonymousUser), but its return type has to be called when used with is, which would be the pythonic way to check here (as if not is_authenticated would also catch None, 0, '' [] etc).

[Tim Graham]

​PR

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In aef117e:

[1.11.x] Fixed #28420 -- Doc'd 'is' comparison restriction for User.is_authenticated/anonymous.