passing a callback as upload_to to FileField

Question

I have an abstract model class UploadItem for handling uploaded files. I want each subclass to be able to define the upload_to path. For this, i pass a callback to the constructor of FileField.

This is an example:

class UploadItem(models.Model):
    file = models.FileField(upload_to=UploadItem.get_directory) 


    class Meta:
        abstract = True
# I want videos to be storred in 'videos/' directory
class Video(UploadItem):
    def get_directory(self, instance, filename):
        return 'videos/'

But this doesn't work, i am getting this error:

file = models.FileField(upload_to=UploadItem.get_directory) 
NameError: name 'UploadItem' is not defined

Manoj Govindan · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-08 18:20:14Z

7

The error is natural given that at the time of evaluating

file = models.FileField(upload_to=UploadItem.get_directory)

the UploadItem class is not yet defined. You can do the following to make it work:

def get_directory():
    pass

class UploadItem(models.Model):
    file = models.FileField(upload_to=get_directory)

    class Meta:
        abstract = True

This won't solve all your problems though. Adding (or overriding) a method get_directory in the Video class will not change the upload_to property of the file attribute of the model.

Update

The documentation says that the upload_to can be a callable.

This may also be a callable, such as a function, which will be called to obtain the upload path, including the filename. This callable must be able to accept two arguments, and return a Unix-style path (with forward slashes) to be passed along to the storage system.

Given this we can write a custom call back function like this:

categories_and_paths = { 'video': 'videos/', 'photo': 'photos/' } # etc.
def get_directory(instance, filename):
    category = instance.category
    return categories_and_paths.get(category, '')

Instance here will be the instance of the respective model. For this to work each model instance should have a category field. We can add one in the body of the model.

class Video(UploadItem):
    category = 'video'

edited Sep 8, 2010 at 18:20

answered Sep 8, 2010 at 16:45

Manoj Govindan

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2 Comments

maroxe Over a year ago

so what do you suggest to achieve whati i want to do? I want each subclass to redefine where to upload files. thanks

maroxe Over a year ago

I see, i wanted the callback to be part of the class. But this is not possible. I will do it this way.

Damaged Organic · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-26 14:24:58Z

This can be done in a similar fashion with some tweaks if you need to use base class properties as part of a subclass:

import os

# ...

def get_directory(instance, filename):
    return instance.get_file_directory(filename)


class UploadItem(models.Model):
    FILE_DIRECTORY = 'files/'

    file = models.FileField(upload_to=get_directory) 

    class Meta:
        abstract = True

    @staticmethod
    def get_file_directory(filename):
        return os.path.join(UploadItem.FILE_DIRECTORY, filename)

And then in subclass:

class Video(UploadItem):
    FILE_DIRECTORY = 'videos/'

    def get_file_directory(self, filename):
        filename = os.path.join(self.FILE_DIRECTORY, filename)
        return super().get_document_path(filename)

This way you will have upload_to that equals:

files for UploadItem
files/videos for Video

Might be useful for more complex objects that require to share some common base property.

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