get the session time in django rest framework

Question

I am a really new bird to python and using Django rest framework. I have followed the tutorial "http://www.django-rest-framework.org/tutorial/quickstart" and created a login logout page for admin. I wanted to track the session time or basically for how long the user has been logged in, I tried doing the same by following many tutorials like these 'https://github.com/GetBlimp/django-rest-framework-jwt' but I think I'm deviating from what I want, please suggest any tutorial or any help. Thanks

last_login will give when the user logged in but when he logged out is also needed. — rosh
Ah, yes, missed that. So maybe just add another field for last_logout and populate it the same way as Django does for last_login? But the question is what is logout. If user clears cookies he is technically logged out, but you cannot track this — Alexandr Tatarinov
didn't know it has last_logout too, I researched a bit but didn't find the same, can you provide some link for the same, it would be a great help. — rosh
Use django sessions: docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/topics/http/sessions. Have a go, put some attempted code up and then let's look again — HenryM

Willem Van Onsem Willem Van Onsem · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-18T19:00:23

It looks to me that this is not stored in the Sessions, but nothing prevents us from storing it ourselves.

We can for example construct a model UserSession:

# models.py

from django.conf import settings
from django.db import models
from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session

class UserSession(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    session = models.OneToOneField(Session, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

    session_start = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

Of course now we still need to ensure that such object is constructed, but we can create a hook for the login procedure:

from django.contrib.auth import user_logged_in
from django.dispatch.dispatcher import receiver

@receiver(user_logged_in)
def register_session(sender, user, request, **kwargs):

    # save current session
    request.session.save()

    # create a link from the user to the current session (for later usage)
    UserSession.objects.get_or_create(
        user=user,
        session=Session.objects.get(pk=request.session.session_key)
    )

We can then obtain the time the session started with:

from datetime import datetime

def some_view(request):
    try:
        session_started = request.session.usersession.session_start
    except UserSession.DoesNotExist:
        # ...
        # handle the case when the UserSession is not present
        pass
    else:
        session_duration = datetime.now() - session_started
        # ...
        pass

get the session time in django rest framework

1 Answers