Unable to set custom permissions in Django

Question

I'm trying to setup some custom permissions for a Django application, but can't seem to get it working. The official documentation is a little scant, and doesn't mention (at least that I can find) how to actually set a permission? Based on a few 3rd party tutorials I found, I've extended the User class and it seems to work OK:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User,UserManager

    class CustomUser(User):
        custom_field = models.CharField(max_length=250)
        objects = UserManager()

        class Meta:
            permissions = (
                ('is_custom','Has a Custom Permission'),
            )

When I try to set a permission however, it doesn't work:

>>> from project.custauth.models import CustomUser
>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User, Permission
>>> user = CustomUser.objects.get(username='new.user')
>>> user
<CustomUser: new.user>
>>> custom_permission = Permission.objects.get(codename="is_custom")
>>> custom_permission
<Permission: custauth | custom user | Has a Custom Permission>
>>> custom_permission.save()
>>> user.user_permissions.add(custom_permission)
>>> user.save()
>>> user.has_perm(custom_permission)
False
>>> user.get_all_permissions()
set([])

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong? I'm using Django 1.2.1 with Python 2.4.3. All input appreciated...

Answer 1

I tested your code (Python 2.6.2, Django 1.2.1) and everything worked as expected. Can you write a unit test to exercise the same code snippet?

On a side note user.has_perm(custom_permission) will not return True. Try user.has_perm('app.is_custom').

Update

Code snippet follows:

In [1]: from app.models import CustomUser

In [2]: from django.contrib.auth.models import User, Permission

In [3]: user = CustomUser.objects.get(username = 'new.user')

In [4]: custom_permission = Permission.objects.get(codename='is_custom')

In [5]: user.user_permissions.add(custom_permission)

In [6]: user.save()

In [7]: user.has_perm(custom_permission)
Out[7]: False

In [8]: user.has_perm('app.is_custom')
Out[8]: True

In [9]: user.get_all_permissions()
Out[9]: set([u'app.is_custom'])