Django not seeing Users in database?

Question

I have a database and have the admin interface enabled. When I go to the admin interface and click on 'Users' there is one user whose username is ayman. I am following a tutorial done in a book called 'Packt Publishing, Learning Website Development with Django'. Now, in my urls.py, this is what I have.

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(r'^$', main_page),
    url(r'^user/(\w+)/$', user_page), 
)

In my views.py, this is my user_page

def user_page(request, username):

    try:
        user = User.objects.get(username=username)
    except:
        raise Http404(username +' not found.')

    bookmarks = user.bookmark_set.all()
    variables = {
        'username': username,
        'bookmarks': bookmarks
    }

    return render(request, 'user_page.html', variables)

I am using the generic User view to manage my users. When I go into the terminal and do

$python manage.py shell

and do

>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User
>>> from bookmarks.models import *
>>> user = User.objects.get(id=1)
>>> user
<User: ayman>
>>> user.username
u'ayman'

as you can see, the username ayman Does exist. Now, going back to the URLs and the user_page view. In my web browser, I went to

127.0.0.1/user/ayman/

The urls.py should capture ayman and pass it as a parameter to user_page, right? It does, but the user_page view keeps raising the 404 error and it says ayman not found. So the username parameter in user_page is in fact ayman but it keeps failing the

user = User.objects.get(username=username)

even though ayman is a username in my database. Any idea why?

Answer 1

You are using a bare except clause, try except User.DoesNotExist. The bare except masks the real error, the missing import. Btw. there is also a shortcut for this:

from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404
# ...
user = get_object_or_404(User, username=username)

The first argument is the model or a queryset, the following are all passed as keyword arguments to queryset.get()