django username in url, instead of id

Question

in a mini virtual community, i have a profile_view function, so that i can view the profile of any registered user. The profile view function has as a parameter the id of the user wich the profile belongs to, so that when i want to access the profile of user 2 for example, i call it like that: http://127.0.0.1:8000/accounts/profile_view/2/

My problem is that i would like to have the username in the url, and NOT the id. I try to modify my code as follows, but it doesn't work still. Here is my code:

view:

def profile_view(request, user):
        u = User.objects.get(pk=user)
        up = UserProfile.objects.get(created_by = u)
        cv = UserProfile.objects.filter(created_by = User.objects.get(pk=user))
        blog = New.objects.filter(created_by = u) 
        replies = Reply.objects.filter(reply_to = blog)
        vote = Vote.objects.filter(voted=blog)
        following = Relations.objects.filter(initiated_by = u)
        follower = Relations.objects.filter(follow = u)
    return render_to_response('profile/publicProfile.html', {
        'vote': vote,
        'u':u,  
        'up':up, 
        'cv': cv, 
        'ing': following.order_by('-date_initiated'),  
        'er': follower.order_by('-date_follow'),
        'list':blog.order_by('-date'),
        'replies':replies
        }, 
        context_instance=RequestContext(request)) 

and my url:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
                        url(r'^profile_view/(?P<user>\d+)/$', 
                           profile_view,
                           name='profile_view'),

thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You don't show what you have tried, or where you are having trouble. This is fairly simple, after all - just pass a username string to the function instead of an integer, and look up based on that.

def profile_view(request, username):
    u = User.objects.get(username=username)

and modify your url to allow strings rather than integers:

url(r'^profile_view/(?P<username>\w+)/$', 
                       profile_view,
                       name='profile_view'),

Answer 2

Here's how I do it using class based generic views and the use of slugs. It's surprisingly easy and requires only a few lines of code with the help of slugs.

# accounts/views.py
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.views.generic.detail import DetailView

class UserProfileView(DetailView):
    model = User
    slug_field = "username"
    template_name = "userprofile.html"

# accounts/urls.py
from views import UserProfileView
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # By user ID
    url(r'^profile/id/(?P<pk>\d+)/$', UserProfileView.as_view()),
    # By username
    url(r'^profile/username/(?P<slug>[\w.@+-]+)/$', UserProfileView.as_view()),
)

Now you can access both the user like accounts/profile/id/123/ as well as accounts/profile/username/gertvdijk/.

What's happening here?

• The usually required pk URL parameter is omitted and replaced by slug in the URL pattern. This is accepted by the view, because...
• The slug parameter is being used by the DetailView (or any other SingleObjectMixin-based view) to find the object on User.username by the use of model = User and slug_field = "username". (docs)
• Because a slug field is optional, the view is also happily serving using just the pk parameter.