Cannot assign django.utils.functional.SimpleLazyObject, must be user instance

Question

What's the right way to assign a User object from django.contrib.auth.models in a view to a model object with a foreign key reference to User? Example new_contact in:

def index(request):
    form = SignupForm(request.POST or None)
    if form.is_valid():
        new_contact = form.save(commit=False)
        new_contact.user = request.user
        new_contact.save()
        # send_mail ...
        return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse('app:template'))
    else:
        return render_to_response('index.html', {'form': form}, context_instance=RequestContext(request))

"new_contact.user = request.user" throws error ValueError at / Cannot assign "": "Contact.user" must be a "User" instance because request.user is an object wrapper, not the actual User (which doesn't exist yet). But if I set new_contact.user = auth.get_user(request) [based on answer here: valueError in modelforms ], it returns NameError 'auth' even though I'm importing django.contrib.auth into my view. What's the right way to do this? thanks

My modelform is:

from django import forms
from .models import Contact

class SignupForm(forms.ModelForm):
 class Meta:
    model = Contact
    fields = ['name','email','company']

Answer 1

The import statement should be:

from django.contrib.auth import get_user

And the actual call to get_user():

new_contact.user = get_user(request)

FYI, quote from django.contrib.auth source:

def get_user(request):
    """
    Returns the user model instance associated with the given request session.
    If no user is retrieved an instance of `AnonymousUser` is returned.
    """
    ...

Hope that helps.