[patch] custom authentication with models.Model in django.contrib.auth.backends

[erob@…]

hi - here's a work-in-progress patch which should allow people to specify alternate
modules for authentication. In short, it introduces another variable in the user
settings file, which serves as the starting point for custom authentication.
If the user still cant authenticate agaisnt that model, then it fallback on the
User object. Please tell me if that works for you, since it's still work-in-progress
and it needs to be polished a lot.. :-)

[erob@…]

here's initial revision -- comments are encouraged!

[James Bennett]

How does this differ from what you can already do with custom auth backends?

[James Bennett]

Also, using objects really isn't safe, because there's no guarantee that a given custom model will have a manager by that name -- using _default_manager, however, will always work.

[anonymous]

ubernostrum: the reason i wrote this is for experimenting authentication with custom models.
If it works, i think it would be simpler (from a user-perspective) to just use django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend instead
of writing a custom backend. But yes, the latter option seems equivalent, if such a backend
would allow user authentication with anything else than the User class. I dont know how to use _default_manager - can you
pls give an example? :)

[James Bennett]

Well, ordinarily if you grab a model, you think to do:

model.objects.filter(some_arg=some_val)

But because people can set up custom managers and avoid having the default objects manager, there's no guarantee that will work -- it's quite possible that you'll just get an AttributeError because someone's model is using a manager that's not named objects. To work around this, the attribute _default_manager always gets you the model's default manager, no matter what that manager happens to be called. Which means that doing

model._default_manager.filter(some_arg=some_val)

should always work, even when there's not a manager named objects.

[(none)]

Milestone Version 1.1 deleted

[Simon G. <dev@…>]

Marking invalid following Ubernostrum's comments above - please re-open if you disagree.