How to show the total count of online friends in the template (django)?

Question

This is my user model-

class CustomUser(AbstractUser):

  user_id = models.UUIDField(default=uuid.uuid4,editable=False,primary_key=True)
  username = models.CharField(max_length = 100,unique = True)
  friends = models.ManyToManyField('CustomUser',related_name="friend", blank= True)
  user_last_seen = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=False)

I am able to track the time when a user was last seen (whether they log out or not) using the following middleware:

class ActiveUserMiddleware(MiddlewareMixin):

  def process_request(self, request):
      current_user = request.user
      if request.user.is_authenticated:
        now = datetime.datetime.now()
        current_user.user_last_seen = now
        current_user.save(update_fields=['user_last_seen'])

And also able to show in my template that whether they are active at the current moment, or when they were last seen -

 {%if i.user_last_seen|timesince|upto:',' < "1 minutes" %}
 <td style="font-size:small; color:green;text-align:right;">
 Active Now
 </td>
 {%else%}
 <td style="font-size:small; color:gray;text-align:right;">
 {{i.user_last_seen|timesince|upto:','}} ago
 </td>
 {%endif%}

Along with this, I want to show the total number of users that are active right now, who are friends with a certain user. But I am having a hard time to understand how to do that exactly. I am still a beginner when it comes to Django, any suggestions or ideas would be really helpful.

Answer 1

You can count the number that are last seen less than one minute ago with:

from django.utils.timezone import now
from datetime import timedelta

active_users = CustomUser.objects.filter(
    user_last_seen__gte=now()-timedelta(minutes=1)
).count()

or the number of active friends:

from django.utils.timezone import now
from datetime import timedelta

active_friends = request.user.friends.filter(
    user_last_seen__gte=now()-timedelta(minutes=1)
).count()

you thus can use this in a view, or in a context processor to pass the number of active users to the template.

You can also define logic in the CustomUser to check if a user is active:

from django.utils.timezone import now
from datetime import timedelta

class CustomUser(AbstractUser):
    user_id = models.UUIDField(default=uuid.uuid4,editable=False,primary_key=True)
    username = models.CharField(max_length = 100,unique = True)
    friends = models.ManyToManyField('CustomUser', blank= True)
    user_last_seen = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=False)

    @property
    def recently_active(self):
        return self.user_last_seen >= now()-timedelta(minutes=1)