How to get a model's last access date in Django?

Question

I'm building a Django application, and in it I would like to track whenever a particular model was last accessed.

I'm opting for this in order to build a user activity history.

I know Django provides auto_now and auto_now_add, but these do not do what I want them to do. The latter tracks when a model was created, and the former tracks when it was last modified, which is different from when it was last accessed, mind you.

I've tried adding another datetime field to my model's specification:

accessed_on = models.DateTimeField()

Then I try to update the model's access manually by calling the following after each access:

model.accessed_on = datetime.utcnow()

model.save()

But it still won't work.

I've gone through the django documentation for an answer, but couldn't find one.

Help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

What about creating a model with a field that contains the last save-date. Plus saving the object every time is translated from the DB representation to the python representation?

class YourModel(models.Model):
    date_accessed = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

    @classmethod
    def from_db(cls, db, field_names, values):
        obj = super().from_db(db, field_names, values)
        obj.save()
        return obj