Django Example: FileField and ImageField

By nitin on February 23, 2009

The syntax to add it in Model is:

class MyModel(models.Model):
	video = FileField(upload_to=None[, max_length=100, **options])

Here upload_to is local filesystem path that will be appended to your MEDIA_ROOT setting to determine the value of the url(mymodel.video.url) attribute.

Setting MEDIA_ROOT and upload_to

If,
MEDIA_ROOT = ‘/home/myname/files/
upload_to=’videos’
file: abc.flv
results in: /home/myname/files/videos/abc.flv

where as if,
MEDIA_ROOT = '/home/myname/files/'
upload_to='/videos'
and file : abc.flv
result will be saved in : '/videos/abc.flv' (i.e., root directory of filesystem)

You can also set upload_to='videos/%Y/%m/%d'. The '%Y/%m/%d' part of upload_to is strftime formatting; '%Y' is the four-digit year, '%m' is the two-digit month and '%d' is the two-digit day. If you upload a file on Jan. 15, 2007, it will be saved in the directory /home/myname/files/videos/2007/01/15.

Now here's how would you save the actual data.

from django.core.files.base import ContentFile
def save_file(request):
	mymodel = MyModel.objects.get(id=1)
	file_content = ContentFile(request.FILES['video'].read())
	mymodel.video.save(request.FILES['video'].name, file_content)

Hope the code is self explanatory. For further help do drop comment.

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6 responses to “Django Example: FileField and ImageField”

Jonatan Anauati
April 26, 2009 at 7:53 pm | Permalink | Reply

thanks!
chris
May 15, 2009 at 3:51 pm | Permalink | Reply

How do you resolve problem with 1 user adding a big video file, and second one want to visit your site.

My prolem is that when I’m uploading a file, the rest of the system is down, and none can use it.
Fenris
July 15, 2009 at 7:32 am | Permalink | Reply

Is the explicit set of the file necessary? I think that if you have a MyModelForm and do
model = MyModelForm(request.POST, request.FILES) thats all you need
Michal
March 6, 2010 at 5:22 am | Permalink | Reply

Exist some way, how to resolve this with chunks instead of read ?
yomguy
April 4, 2010 at 5:52 am | Permalink | Reply

Thanks !

It was very useful for me since a :

mymodel.video.write(f.read())

didn’t worked anymore with Django 1.1…
It’s a shame that the ContentFile object is not really documented from the Django FileField methods and related objects such as UploadedFile and so on (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/file-uploads/)
red pepper
July 5, 2010 at 8:07 pm | Permalink | Reply

Thanks for text very good