Question

Can someone illuminate me as to exactly when an uploaded file is actually written to the location returned by “upload_to” in the FileField, in particular with regards to the order of field, model, and form validation and cleaning?

Right now I have a “clean” method on my model which assumes the uploaded file is in place, so it can do some validation on it. It looks like the file isn’t yet saved, and may just be held in a temporary location or in memory. If that is the case, how do I “open” it or find a path to it if I need to execute some external process/program to validate the file?

Thanks,

Ian

Answer 1

The form cleansing has nothing to do with actually saving the file, or with saving any other data for that matter. The file isn’t saved until to you run the save() method of the model instance (note that if you use ModelName.objects.create() this save() method is called for you automatically).

The bound form will contain an open File object, so you should be able to do any validation on that object directly. For example:

form = MyForm(request.POST, request.FILES)
if form.is_valid():
    file_object = form.cleaned_data['myFile']
    #run any validation on the file_object, or define a clean_myFile() method 
    #  that will be run automatically when you call form.is_valid()

    model_inst = MyModel('my_file' = file_object,
                     #assign other attributes here....
                     )
    model_inst.save() #file is saved to disk here