How to check whether a user is online in django template?

Question

In template, when I use

{% if topic.creator.is_authenticated %}
Online
{% else %}
Offline
{% endif %}

the users turn out to be always onli

Answer 1

As the documentation says:

Even though normally you will check is_autheticated attribute on request.user to find out whether it has been populated by the AuthenticationMiddleware (representing the currently logged-in user), you should know this attribute is True for any User instance.

So to check if user is online I would do something like this:

models.py

class Profile(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User, related_name='profile')           
    is_online = models.BooleanField(default=False)

views.py

from django.contrib.auth.signals import user_logged_in, user_logged_out
from django.dispatch import receiver    

@receiver(user_logged_in)
def got_online(sender, user, request, **kwargs):    
    user.profile.is_online = True
    user.profile.save()

@receiver(user_logged_out)
def got_offline(sender, user, request, **kwargs):   
    user.profile.is_online = False
    user.profile.save()

And then in your template you would check if user is online:

{% if user.profile.is_online %}
    Online
{% else %}
    Offline
{% endif %}

Don't forget to return user instance to your template in order for user.profile.is_online to work.