Django ORM: SELECT on field attributes

Question

Hello everyone,

I have a model that contains a FileField. I want to search for a specific filename. How do I do it? I was trying:

MyModel.objects.get(document__name=FOO)

I got a Join on field 'document' is not permitted.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The attributes of a FileField are not stored in the database, and cannot be used in a query. For example, the name is simply the upload_to string plus the filename. If you want to store extra data about the file you have to put that data into other fields on the database, as the example documentation shows with a Car having a name of "57 Chevy".

Also, typically the double underscore in Django's ORM denotes following a database relationship, either a ForeignKey or a ManyToMany. So in the example ORM call you provided, I would assume that MyModel had a field document that was either a ForeignKey or ManyToMany to another model, and that other model has a field called name. Which doesn't sound like is the case.

Hope that helps some.

Answer 2

You can filter on document, and it'll filter by the string that is the path on disk to the file.

Answer 3

Do this instead:

MyModel.objects.get(document__icontains='FOO')