Django: Why create a OneToOne to UserProfile instead of subclassing auth.User?

Question

Note: If you are tempted to \'answer\' this question by telling me that you don\'t like django.contrib.auth, please move on. That will not be helpful. I am well aware of t

Answer 1

You do realise, don't you, that model subclassing is implemented by means of a OneToOne relationship under the hood? In fact, as far as efficiency is concerned, I cannot see any difference at all between these two methods.

Subclassing of existing concrete models is, in my opinion, a nasty hack that should be avoided if at all possible. It involves hiding a database relationship so that it is unclear when extra db access is performed. It's much clearer to show the relationships explicitly, and access them explicitly where necessary.

Now, a third alternative which I do like is to create a completely new User model, along with a custom authentication backend that returns instances of the new model instead of the default one. Creating a backend only involves defining a couple of simple methods, so it's very easy to do.