Question

I am trying to figure out this issue related to Django from https://github.com/miki725/Django-jQuery-File-Uploader-Integration-demo/issues/1

Under what conditions can request.method == None in Django?

Answer 1

TL;DR: request.method is never None in real use, but for your particular case, you’re looking at the wrong thing.

Generic HttpRequest

django/http/__init__.py:

class HttpRequest(object):
    ...
    def __init__(self):
        ...
        self.method = None
        ...

When a plain HttpRequest is instantiated, its method is None. But then, WSGIRequest and ModPythonRequest don’t call HttpRequest.__init__ ever.

Requests through mod_wsgi

django/core/handlers/wsgi.py:

class WSGIRequest(http.HttpRequest):
    ...
    def __init__(self, environ):
        ...
        self.method = environ['REQUEST_METHOD'].upper()
        ...

The summary of this is that for mod_wsgi, request.method will never be None. If in some warped way you managed to get environ['REQUEST_METHOD'] not being defined or being None, the request would fail.

Requests through mod_python

django/core/handlers/modpython.py:

class ModPythonRequest(http.HttpRequest):
    ...
    def _get_method(self):
        return self.META['REQUEST_METHOD'].upper()
    ...
    method = property(_get_method)

Same remarks as with WSGIRequest apply. Can’t ever be None.

Test client

django.test.client.RequestFactory.request instantiates a WSGIRequest and is called every time with REQUEST_METHOD defined in the environ as an uppercase string, as it should be.

---

Summary:

assert request.method is not None

You’re looking for the error in the wrong place. In this case, request.method == 'POST'. It’s failing when request.META.get('CONTENT_TYPE', '') is None. The reason for this is that the Content-Type header isn’t being sent by the client in the request (don’t ask me why, I’m not familiar with that stuff).