Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. Often referred to as a 'batteries included' web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

Storing Files on Model Instances

So far, we have manually managed the uploading and saving of files. You can also associate a file with a model instance by assigning the path to which it was saved to a CharField. However, as with much of Django, this capability (and more) is already provided with the models.FileField class. FileField instances do not actually store the file data; instead, they store the path where the file is stored (like a CharField would), but they also provide helper methods. These methods assist with loading files (so you do not have to manually open them) and generating disk paths for you based on the ID of the instance (or other attributes).

FileField can accept two specific optional arguments in its constructor (as well as the base Field arguments, such as required, unique, help_text, and so on):

  • max_length: Like max_length in the form's ImageField, this is the maximum length of the filename that is allowed.
  • upload_to: The upload_to argument...