Question

Given the model:

class Person(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    resume = models.FileField(upload_to='resumes/', blank=True, null=True)

I have created a few people via:

Person.objects.create(name='Brad')
Person.objects.create(name='Tony')

How do I write a query using the ORM to give me people that don’t have a resume. I’ve tried the following, but all fail to return the desired result:

>>> Person.objects.filter(resume=None)
[]
>>> Person.objects.filter(resume__exact=None)
[]
>>> Person.objects.filter(resume__isnull=True)
[]

Answer 1

I’m pretty sure that you filter by empty string ''

Person.objects.filter(resume='')

The underlying field is a CharField() as mentioned by the docs for Filefield.

Django stores blanks for CharFields as empty strings not NULL, so filtering for empty strings gets you Persons with no resumes.

Model Field References regarding Null