Creating a User Profile model in Django to hold additional user info

Creating a new user in a Django project is quite straightforward and well-documented.

But most of the time, you want to capture more data than the basic user model provided by Django. You see, the default Django user model only contains fields for the first name, last name, and email. The typical registration flow usually requires more data to be captured. In this case, the recommended way is to create a user profile model, and "link" it to the user using a one-to-one relationship.

In this post, we will show a complete example of declaring a user profile model, the registration form that contains both the user fields and the user profile fields, and finally the view that will handle the creation of the user and user profile instances in the database.

Model

class UserProfile(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL,
                                on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    id_number = models.CharField(max_length=20, unique=True)
    occupation = models.CharField(max_length=50, blank=True)
    address = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    street_number = models.CharField(max_length=10)
    flat_number = models.CharField(max_length=10, blank=True)
    zip_code = models.CharField(max_length=10)
    city = models.CharField(max_length=50)

The only highlight in this model declaration is the use of OneToOneField relationships. This means that instances of this UserProfile model can point to one and only one instance of the User model.

Also, note that we are not referencing directly the User model, but we are using settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL as recommended in the documentation to support custom-defined models. Finally, we are using on_delete=models.CASCADE to ensure that when a User is deleted, the "linked" UserProfile will be deleted as well.

Form

class RegistrationForm(forms.Form):
    first_name = forms.CharField(max_length=100)
    last_name = forms.CharField(max_length=100)
    email = forms.EmailField(
        validators=[validate_email], 
        widget=forms.EmailInput())
    password = forms.CharField(
        max_length=200, 
        widget=forms.PasswordInput(), 
        validators=[validate_password]
    )
    
    id_number = forms.CharField(max_length=20)
    occupation = forms.CharField(max_length=50, required=False)
    address = forms.CharField(max_length=100)
    street_number = forms.CharField(max_length=10)
    flat_number = forms.CharField(max_length=10, required=False)
    zip_code = forms.CharField(max_length=10)
    city = forms.CharField(max_length=10)

This is the form used to present and validate the registration page. Notice that the first 4 fields refer to the User model, and the rest of them in the UserProfile model.

View

class RegistrationView(FormView):
    template_name = "registration.html"
    form_class = RegistrationForm
    success_url = reverse_lazy("register_successful")

    @transaction.atomic
    def form_valid(self, form):
        user = CustomUser.objects.create_user(
            email=form.cleaned_data["email"],
            password=form.cleaned_data["password"],
            first_name=form.cleaned_data["first_name"],
            last_name=form.cleaned_data["last_name"],
        )
        CustomUserProfile.objects.create(
            user=user,
            id_number=form.cleaned_data["id_number"],
            occupation=form.cleaned_data["occupation"],
            address=form.cleaned_data["address"],
            street_number=form.cleaned_data["street_number"],
            flat_number=form.cleaned_data["flat_number"],
            zip_code=form.cleaned_data["zip_code"],
            city=form.cleaned_data["city"]).save()

This is a Class-Based View (CBV) that is specifically for rendering and saving models based on a provided form (notice that it's extending FormView class).

The main work of this view takes place in the form_valid() method. This is called when the elements in the form are validated and this is called for you to implement the business logic of constructing and saving the models.

Since you will be saving 2 instances, one User and one UserProfile, notice that we are using the @transaction.atomic annotation to ensure that if for some reason one of the model creation fails, the database will roll back the changes. (read this for more details on Django and atomic transactions).

The rest of the code is just for first creating a User using the create_user() method and then a UserProfile that references the newly created User.

Hopefully, this was a quick and to-the-point tutorial on how to create a User with a UserProfile to hold additional data about your users.

Happy coding!