Django: Staff Decorator

I'm trying to write a "staff only" decorator for Django, but I can't seem to get it to work:

def staff_only(error='Only staff may view this page.'):
    def _dec(view_func):
        def _view(request, *args, **kwargs):
            u = request.user
            if u.is_authenticated() and u.is_staff:
                return view_func(request, *args, **kwargs)
            messages.error(request, error)
            return HttpResponseRedirect(request.META.get('HTTP_REFERER', reverse('home')))
        _view.__name__ = view_func.__name__
        _view.__dict__ = view_func.__dict__
        _view.__doc__ = view_func.__doc__
        return _view
    return _dec

Trying to follow lead from here. I'm getting:

'WSGIRequest' object has no attribute '__name__'

But if I take those 3 lines out, I just get a useless "Internal Server Error". What am I doing wrong here?

Solution 1:

This decorator already exists as

from django.contrib.admin.views.decorators import staff_member_required

@staff_member_required

Trunk: http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/contrib/admin/views/decorators.py

Solution 2:

For Class Based Views, you can decorate the view class's dispatch method like this:

from django.contrib.admin.views.decorators import staff_member_required
from django.utils.decorators import method_decorator


@method_decorator(staff_member_required, name='dispatch')
class ExampleTemplateView(TemplateView):
    ...

Solution 3:

This style of decorator function is used with a parameterised decorator - eg when you do:

@staffonly(my_arguments)
def function(request):
    blah

If you're not actually calling the outer function, ie you're using it like this:

@staffonly
def function(request):

You will get odd results, as the function object will be passed to the wrong one of the nested functions in the decorator.