Django FileField with upload_to determined at runtime

Question

I'm trying to set up my uploads so that if user joe uploads a file it goes to MEDIA_ROOT/joe as opposed to having everyone's files go to MEDIA_ROOT. The problem is I don't know how to define this in the model. Here is how it currently looks:

class Content(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    file = models.FileField(upload_to='.')

So what I want is instead of '.' as the upload_to, have it be the user's name.

I understand that as of Django 1.0 you can define your own function to handle the upload_to but that function has no idea of who the user will be either so I'm a bit lost.

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You've probably read the documentation, so here's an easy example to make it make sense:

def content_file_name(instance, filename):
    return '/'.join(['content', instance.user.username, filename])

class Content(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    file = models.FileField(upload_to=content_file_name)

As you can see, you don't even need to use the filename given - you could override that in your upload_to callable too if you liked.