Django edit user profile

Question

I'm trying to create an "Edit Profile" form in the fronted. What happens is that my form(i'm not 100% sure) tries to create a user instead of finding the current user and update his profile. So I think that's the issue. Checked many questions here but none was clear enough. The fields I'm trying to edit are email, first name and last name. (Also I would like to add uda

forms.py

class UpdateProfile(forms.ModelForm):
    username = forms.CharField(required=True)
    email = forms.EmailField(required=True)
    first_name = forms.CharField(required=False)
    last_name = forms.CharField(required=False)

    class Meta:
        model = User
        fields = ('username', 'email', 'first_name', 'last_name')

    def clean_email(self):
        username = self.cleaned_data.get('username')
        email = self.cleaned_data.get('email')

        if email and User.objects.filter(email=email).exclude(username=username).count():
            raise forms.ValidationError('This email address is already in use. Please supply a different email address.')
        return email

    def save(self, commit=True):
        user = super(RegistrationForm, self).save(commit=False)
        user.email = self.cleaned_data['email']

        if commit:
            user.save()

        return user

views.py

def update_profile(request):
    args = {}

    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = UpdateProfile(request.POST)
        form.actual_user = request.user
        if form.is_valid():
            form.save()
            return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse('update_profile_success'))
    else:
        form = UpdateProfile()

    args['form'] = form
    return render(request, 'registration/update_profile.html', args)

Answer 1

You are very close. When you are instantiating the form, you need to pass the User object you are modifying as the instance argument.

From the docs:

A subclass of ModelForm can accept an existing model instance as the keyword argument instance; if this is supplied, save() will update that instance.

In your code, it would look like:

form = UpdateProfile(request.POST, instance=request.user)
if form.is_valid():
    ...

You can checkout more info here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/topics/forms/modelforms/#the-save-method

Answer 2

Or if you wanna go the Class Based View way, using the UpdateView, you could do something like this in views.py:

class UpdateProfile(UpdateView):
    model = MyProfile
    fields = ['first_name', 'last_name', 'image', 'url', 'biography', '...'] # Keep listing whatever fields 
    # the combined UserProfile and User exposes.
    template_name = 'user_update.html'
    slug_field = 'username'
    slug_url_kwarg = 'slug'

where you have something like this for MyProfile in models.py:

class MyProfile(AbstractUser):
    image = models.ImageField(upload_to='uploads/profile/')
    url = models.URLField()
    biography = models.CharField(max_length=1000)

and your urls.py like so (assuming you're using django allauth and wanna honor the url convention):

....
url(r'^accounts/update/(?P<slug>[\-\w]+)/$', views.UpdateProfile.as_view(), name='update_user'),
....

The rest is Django fun! I'll recommend you write less code if you could for basic CRUD tasks, unless its really necessary to do something custom, of which even you still can get away by extending the Class Based Views.

And in case you're in for more, see here: Django Docs on Class Based Views