Web Developer Bootcamp with Flask and Python

# Showing only the logged in user's movies

TIP

List of all code changes made in this lecture: https://diff-store.com/diff/section14__17_showing_only_user_movies (opens new window)

# Adding the login_required decorator

In the lecture on Adding a login_required decorator, in section 13, I said that the decorator code would come in handy in many future projects. This is one such project, so let's bring the decorator in to routes.py:

import functools

...

def login_required(route):
    @functools.wraps(route)
    def route_wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        if session.get("email") is None:
            return redirect(url_for(".login"))

        return route(*args, **kwargs)

    return route_wrapper

Then we can use it to decorate a few of our endpoints:

  • index
  • add_movie
  • edit_movie
  • watch_today
  • rate_movie

Remember that the @login_required decorator should be applied between the @pages.route(...) decorator and the def function_name(...) line.

# Adding movies to this user's movie list

Since we are going to require login before being able to add a movie, we will know the user that is making the request to the add_movie endpoint.

Since we know the user, we can add the newly-added movie to their profile by adding it to this user's movies list.

In the add_movie endpoint I'm adding these lines:

current_app.db.user.update_one(
    {"_id": session["user_id"]}, {"$push": {"movies": movie._id}}
)

Using session["user_id"], we can go directly into MongoDB, and use $push to add a new value to the movies list. Note that we didn't need to create a User object since all we need is already in the session.

# Showing only this user's movies in the index

At the moment our index endpoint does this to load movie data:

movie_data = current_app.db.movie.find({})

Now want to load the user's data, and then check the user's movies and only load the movies in that list:

user_data = current_app.db.user.find_one({"email": session["email"]})
user = User(**user_data)

movie_data = current_app.db.movie.find({"_id": {"$in": user.movies}})

Using $in with MongoDB only gives us movies whose _id property is one of the user.movies.

And with that, we've added personalization to our app. Instead of showing all movies to everyone, we only show this user's movies.

Note that we could add another endpoint to view all movies added by all users, and that would be identical to our index endpoint before we made changes. That would be useful if we wanted to allow comments or reviews for movies added by other users, for example.

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