My app rarely modifies the auth_user table, if at all.  Here is a
quick middleware I wrote to go aloneside the current
AuthenticationMiddleware, and it works perfectly!  Only 2 database
hits when viewing an account page.  One hit to the session table, and
other hit to the table which holds various account settings.

class UserPickleMiddleware(object):
  def process_request(self, request):
    if 'cached_user' not in request.session:
      from django.contrib.auth import get_user
      request.session['cached_user'] = get_user(request)
    request._cached_user = request.session['cached_user']
    return None

I place this just before the standard AuthenticationMiddleware.  I
will continue to run tests and see how it functions, if say the user
is added or removed from a group.

My sessions are stored in a database, which makes this interesting.
As it's only hitting the database once to grab both the session and
current user information.

Here is an update which works with logging back in:

class UserPickleMiddleware(object):
  def process_request(self, request):
    if 'cached_user' not in request.session:
      from django.contrib.auth import get_user
      user = get_user(request)
      if isinstance(user, User):
        request.session['cached_user'] = user
    if 'cached_user' in request.session:
      request._cached_user = request.session['cached_user']
    return None

This one makes sure that the user instance is indeed a regular User
and not some Anonymous person before setting the cached data.  The
code could be more optimized.  I didn't use an Else, because it's
needs to set the request variables.  I'd rather write an extra "if"
instead of copying the same line to set the request variable twice.

On Oct 29, 5:45 am, Kevin <kveron...@gmail.com> wrote: