Question

I have the HTML form which do prior upload of files via AJAX. So in django backend I have the following code of View, which process this AJAX calls:

@csrf_exempt
def book_upload(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        log.info('received POST to main book_upload view')
        if request.FILES is None:
            return HttpResponseBadRequest('Must have files attached!')

        log.info('request has FILES')

        file_types = (u'file_pdf', u'file_djvu', u'file_doc', u'file_epub', u'file_djvu', u'file_fb2', u'file_txt', u'file_chm', u'file_other');
        file = None
        file_type = None
        for ft in file_types:
            if ft in request.FILES:
                file = request.FILES[ft]
                file_type = ft
                break

        if file is None:
            return HttpResponseBadRequest('Bad file type')

        file_path = file.temporary_file_path()

        result = {"path": file_path, "format": file_type}
        response_data = simplejson.dumps(result)

        if "application/json" in request.META['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING']:
            mimetype = 'application/json'
        else:
            mimetype = 'text/plain'
        return HttpResponse(response_data, mimetype=mimetype)
    else:
        return HttpResponse('Only POST accepted')

But there is the problem in this code. It works on files more than 2.5 mb (because of TemporaryUploadedFile used than file size is > 2.5 mb by default settings). So and this code is based on idea that request.FILES contains object with TemporaryUploadedFile type. But in some cases I receive files with size < 2.5 mb. And request.FILES contains InMemoryUploadedFile.

So, I want do the following – each file, which is uploaded via ajax should be temporary stored. And memory is not a good place do that – because final re-storing files (after form submit) will not have information about this file in memory. So, the task is to “convert” InMemoryUploadedFile to TemporaryUploadedFile – is it possible?

PS

Maybe I should simply read file content from InMemoryUploadedFile object and write it to disk manually (to /tmp directory for example). How do you think?

PPS

And one another question – is it a good idea to do prior upload to temp directory?:) In my case the form have 6 input[type=file] elements, each of them upload different file type (six is for UI needs).

TIA!

Answer 1

You can override the default in FILE_UPLOAD_HANDLERS in settings.py

# only use TemporaryFileUploadHandler for file uploads
FILE_UPLOAD_HANDLERS = (
    'django.core.files.uploadhandler.TemporaryFileUploadHandler',
)