Question

I’ve been trying to work out the ‘best practices’ way to manage file uploads with Turbogears 2 and have thus far not really found any examples. I’ve figured out a way to actually upload the file, but I’m not sure how reliable it us.

Also, what would be a good way to get the uploaded files name?

    file = request.POST['file']
    permanent_file = open(os.path.join(asset_dirname,
        file.filename.lstrip(os.sep)), 'w')
    shutil.copyfileobj(file.file, permanent_file)
    file.file.close()
    this_file = self.request.params["file"].filename 
    permanent_file.close()

So assuming I’m understanding correctly, would something like this avoid the core ‘naming’ problem? id = UUID.

    file = request.POST['file']
    permanent_file = open(os.path.join(asset_dirname,
        id.lstrip(os.sep)), 'w')
    shutil.copyfileobj(file.file, permanent_file)
    file.file.close()
    this_file = file.filename
    permanent_file.close()

Answer 1

@mhawke – you’re right you have to handle that – depends on what you are doing with the file, if it doesn’t matter if there is a name collision eg you only care for the latest version of some data then theres probably no issue, or if the filename isn’t actually important just the file contents, but its still bad practice.

You could use a named tempfile in a tmp dir, then move the file once validated to its final location. Or you could check the filename doesn’t already exist like so:

file.name = slugify(myfile.filename)
name, ext = os.path.splitext(file.name)
while os.path.exists(os.path.join(permanent_store, file.name)):
    name += '_'
    file.name = name + ext

raw_file = os.path.join(permanent_store, file.name)

The slugify method would be used to tidy up the filename…