Question

I have the django form where user attach the files, but I am extracting the pdf form data from the file itself so I don’t want to save the file.

But when I save the form then file automatically gets saved. Is there any way to prevent the file from being saved?

thanks

Answer 1

When a file is being uploaded to your server, django handles the uploaded file depending on the FILE_UPLOAD_HANDLER you specify. By default, they are:-

("django.core.files.uploadhandler.MemoryFileUploadHandler",
 "django.core.files.uploadhandler.TemporaryFileUploadHandler",)

which means that the file object is in your server’s memory until form.save() (where the form object contains your uploaded file) is called. Once it is called, the file object is written into your filesystem based on what you specified in that file field’s upload_to attribute.

What I would do to prevent this uploaded file from being written into your filesystem would be to assign this file object to a variable without calling form.save(). Like this:-

uploaded_file = request.FILES['file']

and we can deliberately not assign request.FILES, like this:-

form = MyModelFormWithFileField(request.POST, None)

Since you have uploaded_file variable assigned, you can now do whatever you wish to it without writing it into the filesystem.

And since your form instance do not have request.FILES assigned, form.save() will not write your form data into the filesystem.