Using django-rest-auth registration with multiple user types

Question

I'm actually learning Django Rest Framework and I have this project that involves multiple user types so for example it consists of Students, Teachers and Admins each one with his attributes so I created a User model that inherits from AbstractUser and 3 other models for each type where each type has a foreign key of it's corresponding user. So here comes the problem how can I use Django-Rest-Auth library with these user types so for example when I use the register endpoint how can I modify it in order to create a Student in the students model based on the request data ?

I would appreciate any ones help.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I would go with something like this for REST. So in my models,

class CustomUser(AbstractUser):

    CHOICES = (
        ('T', 'Teacher'),
        ('A', 'Administration'),
        ('S', 'Student'),
    )
    role = models.CharField(max_length=1, choices=CHOICES)

class Teacher(models.Model):
     user = models.OneToOneField(
        CustomUser, on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name="teacher_account"
    )
...

class Student(models.Model):
...

Once your models are up and your settings updated to use the custom AUTH_USER_MODEL, create a custom registration serializer.

from rest_framework import serializers

from allauth.account.adapter import get_adapter
from allauth.account.utils import setup_user_email

from rest_auth.registration.serializers import RegisterSerializer


class MyCustomRegistrationSerializer(RegisterSerializer):
    CHOICES = (
        ('T', 'Teacher'),
        ('A', 'Administration'),
        ('S', 'Student'),
    )
    role = serializers.ChoiceField(max_length=1, choices=CHOICES)

    def get_cleaned_data(self):
        data_dict = super().get_cleaned_data()
        data_dict['role'] = self.validated_data.get('role', '')
        return data_dict

Note the difference,serializers.ChoiceField. Go ahead and tell django to use this during registration.So in your settings.py:

# note the path, use the location of your current serializers
REST_AUTH_REGISTER_SERIALIZERS = {
    'REGISTER_SERIALIZER': 'api.serializers.MyCustomRegistrationSerializer',
}

Now, your local path for registering users should show an additional choice filed so that whenever a new user registers, they specify what role they have.

To save this information to the database during registration, however, create an adapter. So in your project application, say app3/adapter.py:

from allauth.account.adapter import DefaultAccountAdapter


class CustomAccountAdapter(DefaultAccountAdapter):

    def save_user(self, request, user, form, commit=False):
        user = super().save_user(request, user, form, commit)
        data = form.cleaned_data
        user.preferred_locale = data.get('role')
        user.save()
        return user

Likewise, register this adapter in your settings.

ACCOUNT_ADAPTER = 'app3.adapter.CustomAccountAdapter'

This should work. Have not tested it out for your particular use case though.