[FIXED] How to assign currently logged in user as default value for a model field?

Issue

I'd like to do something like this:

class Task(models.Model):
    ...
    created_by = models.ForeignKey(
        User, 
        **default=[LoggedInUser]**,
        blank=True,
        null=True,
        related_name='created_by',
    )

Is this possible? I couldn't find what's the proper way to get the logged in user, apart from doing request.user, in a view, which doesn't seem to work here.

PS_ I realise I could initialize the Model data by other means, but I think this is the cleanest way.

Solution

No, you can't do it this way. Django (and Python) has pretty much zero global values, and that's a Good Thing(tm). Normally you get the current user in the view(request) with request.user. You can then pass that as a param to various methods/functions, but trying to set a global user will only lead to tears in a multi-threaded environment.

There should be a bumper sticker that says, Globals are Evil. This will give you a good idea about my Number One problem with PHP.

Answered By - Peter Rowell