Django 1.5 custom user model - signals limitation

Question

It\'s written in the doc that:

Another limitation of custom User models is that you can’t use django.contrib.auth.get_user_model() as the sender or target

Answer 1

It's because the object hasn't been "installed" when the signal is being created so get_user_model() can't find the object that it needs to attach the signal handler.

See this bug for the details on how it was found and what the problem is.

Your example wouldn't work because the get_user_model() call would fail for this reason. For now the only way to make a signal handler work with a custom User class is to name it directly without using get_user_model(), eg

@receiver(post_save, sender=myapp.MyUserModel) # can't use get_user_model() here
def user_saved(sender=None, instance=None, **kwargs):
    # something

Your coding style could also do with some work: when you run User = get_user_model(), that creates a variable called User with its value set to the results of the get_user_model() function call. Python convention (and that of most other languages) is for normal variables to start with a lower-case letter and for classes to start with an upper case letter.

So user = get_user_model() and then using the user variable later on would make much more sense to anyone reading your code and would help to avoid confusion in the future.