[FIXED] Access current user in custom django widget

Issue

I have a custom widget used to replace the dropdown for the ForeignKey field with a list of images with radiobuttons. In my render method I need to access the current user (the user who is currently logged in), like I would in a normal view with using request.user.

I have read a lot of solutions to do this with Forms, that you should pop the user object from **kwargs in your __init__ method.

However widgets doesn't have **kwargs in their __init__ method:

def __init__(self, attrs=None):
    if attrs is not None:
        self.attrs = attrs.copy()
    else:
        self.attrs = {}

How do I access the current user within a Widget sub-class?

Solution

I found a solution by reading through the Django source: Pass the user object when setting the formfield_overrides in the custom admin.

I have 2 models: News and Image. Image contains a name field and an ImageField. The News model contains a ForeignKey which points to image:

class News(models.Model):
    ... bunch of news related fields
    image = models.ForeignKey(Image)

Then in my admin.py I have a custom admin class for news:

class NewsAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    model = News
    
    def get_form(self, request, obj=None, **kwargs):
        self.formfield_overrides = {
            models.ForeignKey : {'widget' : SelectForeign(user = request.user)}
        }

        return super(NewsAdmin, self).get_form(request, obj, **kwargs)

Then in my widget.py I have a custom widget class:

class SelectForeign(widgets.Widget):
    current_user = None

    def __init__(self, attrs=None, choices=(), user = None):
        self.current_user = user
        super(SelectForegin, self).__init__(attrs, choices)

And that's it, now my widget contains the current logged in user. It's not pretty imo, but it works.

Note: This replaces all ForeignKey fields inside the News model. To fix this, there should be a custom ForeignKey sub-class used so that we can override that one only.

If anyone has a better solution which is cleaner, please share and I'll accept.

Answered By - rzetterberg