How to capture the session key for an anonymous user (django 1.6)

Question

Am trying to keep track of AnonymousUsers by their session information (if possible).

In older versions of Django, I could do something like:

def my_view(request):

    # in case the user wasn't logged in, create/save a session
    if not request.session.session_key:
        request.session.save()

    # would give me the key and on the next load it would persist
    session_key = request.session.session_key

But with 1.6 (and I've been out of the game for a while) this results in a new unique session ID each time the request is put through. There is no persistence. I've tried to do a little reading but am going in circles as I'm out of Django practice.

How do I have a session persist? Do I need to write my own cookie handling?

[django session key changing upon authentication][1] [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/14757138/1978033 — John, Aug 25 '14 at 00:33
Thanks for the link - tried overriding the `cycle_key` method but it doesn't appear that is being called at all when an anonymous user refreshes a page ... at each refresh I am getting an empty session_key. — thornomad, Aug 25 '14 at 01:57

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 25 '14 at 03:38

So, after I started reading through the source code I found myself on the global_settings.py file and found this gem:

SESSION_SAVE_EVERY_REQUEST = True

When I added that to the settings.py file my problems were solved. AnonymousUsers got a session_key. Yipee!

How to capture the session key for an anonymous user (django 1.6)

1 Answers1