Answer by Chase Seibert for Persisting session variables across login

I actually think your initial design made sense. If you want to save some session variables across the login/logout boundary, you can do something like this.

from functools import wrapsclass persist_session_vars(object):""" Some views, such as login and logout, will reset all session state.    However, we occasionally want to persist some of those session variables."""    session_backup = {}    def __init__(self, vars):        self.vars = vars    def __enter__(self):        for var in self.vars:            self.session_backup[var] = self.request.session.get(var)    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_value, traceback):        for var in self.vars:            self.request.session[var] = self.session_backup.get(var)    def __call__(self, test_func, *args, **kwargs):        @wraps(test_func)        def inner(*args, **kwargs):            if not args:                raise Exception('Must decorate a view, ie a function taking request as the first parameter')            self.request = args[0]            with self:                return test_func(*args, **kwargs)        return inner

You would throw this decorator on whatever view you're calling auth.login/logout from. If you're delegating to the built-in view for those, you can easily wrap them.

from django.contrib.auth import views@persist_session_vars(['HTTP_REFERER'])def login(request, *args, **kwargs):    return views.login(request, *args, **kwargs)