What is the best way to extend BaseUser

[jrocketdev]

Hopefully the question is self-explanatory enough. I'm new to piccolo, coming from mainly using sqlalchemy previously. I love the 'battery included' BaseUser class and 'user' app. However, I'd like to build in multifactor authentication and would like to add a phone number column to the BaseUser class. What is the most appropriate way to do that while also still taking advantage of the nice 'user' app commands? I can't think of an elegant approach to make sure the migration get updated correctly and I don't break any of the user' app features. I've seen a suggestion to just create a new table with a foreign key but would rather modify the initial table instead for this other column that I will always consider mandatory. Thanks for any help!

[dantownsend]

@rogersjw In my own apps I usually create a Profile table with a ForeignKey to BaseUser, which includes any custom fields.

class Profile(Table):
    user = ForeignKey(BaseUser)
    phone_number = Varchar()

There isn't an official way at the moment to add fields to the BaseUser table.

You could copy the entire user app (see source) from Piccolo, and create your own custom app based off it.

If you're using Piccolo Admin, then create_admin accepts an auth_table argument (see docs) - you could tell it to use your custom BaseUser table, instead of the default one.

I hope that's helpful.

[sinisaos]

@dantownsend Both methods work. Can you add a section on extending BaseUser to docs? This would be useful to other users.

[dantownsend]

@sinisaos Yeah, you're right - this should be added to the docs.