Opened 15 years ago

Last modified 10 months ago

#10244 assigned Bug

FileFields can't be set to NULL in the db — at Version 17

Reported by: oyvind Owned by: nobody
Component: Database layer (models, ORM) Version: 1.0
Severity: Normal Keywords: filefield NULL empty
Cc: Triage Stage: Accepted
Has patch: yes Needs documentation: yes
Needs tests: no Patch needs improvement: no
Easy pickings: no UI/UX: no

Description (last modified by Raffaele Salmaso)

Hi,

Change History (20)

comment:1 by oyvind, 15 years ago

Patch does not seem to work quite like I expected. So the problem persists.

comment:2 by oyvind, 15 years ago

Example to test this issue:

                
class File(models.Model):

    file = models.FileField(null=True, upload_to='files') 
from models import File

f = File()
f.file = None
f.save()

from django.db import connection
print connection.queries

by oyvind, 15 years ago

Attachment: filefield_null.diff added

Patch that solves this issue, FieldFile's name can now be None also "is" and "==" is not the same

by Alex Gaynor, 15 years ago

Attachment: null-filefield.diff added

comment:3 by Alex Gaynor, 15 years ago

Triage Stage: UnreviewedDesign decision needed

needs to be decided whether the CharField behavior should be used throughout, or NULL where explicitly requested

by oyvind, 15 years ago

Attachment: null-filefield-2.diff added

Meade FieldFile set name to u on delete, made test show filefields and charfields act the same

comment:4 by Karen Tracey, 15 years ago

Dev list discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/cf37abc95e49f0e/

Also, #10749 reported surprise at searching for None not working when looking for empty ImageFields. I still think changing this now breaks backwards-compatibility, though.

comment:5 by Thejaswi Puthraya, 15 years ago

Component: UncategorizedDatabase layer (models, ORM)

comment:6 by Chris Beaven, 13 years ago

Severity: Normal
Type: Bug

comment:7 by Aymeric Augustin, 13 years ago

Easy pickings: unset
Triage Stage: Design decision neededAccepted
UI/UX: unset

I see two possible solutions:

  • 1. document that FileField ignores the null keyword argument; this is the most backwards compatible solution;
  • 2. make FileField behave exactly like CharField wrt. null; this is the most consistent solution.

Option 2. will be backwards incompatible only for people who set null=True on a FileField. The docs discourage that heavily, and it doesn't behave as expected, actually it doesn't even do anything, so there isn't much reason to have such code. That's why I think the change would be acceptable.

I have a slight preference for option 2, which is better in the long term.

comment:8 by siroky@…, 11 years ago

Hi! What is the status of this ticket? I see it is 5 years old ticket and the problem is still present at least in 1.5.1.

comment:9 by Aymeric Augustin, 11 years ago

It's waiting for someone to write a patch.

by siroky@…, 11 years ago

Attachment: filefield_null.patch added

None/NULL for FileField (v1.5.1)

comment:10 by siroky@…, 11 years ago

How about the filefield_null.patch? It follows solution 2.

comment:11 by Claude Paroz, 11 years ago

Has patch: set
Needs documentation: set
Needs tests: set

Thanks, it's a first step :-) However, tests are crucial with such a change. That will be the next step. See FileFieldTestsin tests/model_fields/tests.py.

comment:12 by anonymous, 11 years ago

How can I run the FileFieldTests without the whole suite?

comment:14 by siroky@…, 11 years ago

I bumped into a problem. If instance.null_file_field is None then methods like save() will not work (AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'save'). I'm thinking about 2 solutions:
1) Make the descriptor return value comparable to None (via __eq__). This is not very clean because the best practise is to use operator is (is_none = x is None).
2) Keep the empty string ("") on the Python side as a representation of file's database NULL. Not very consistent but it has better backward compatibility if someone already uses the string comparison (has_no_file = filefield.name == "").

Any suggestions?

comment:16 by Claude Paroz, 9 years ago

#25528 was a duplicate.

comment:17 by Raffaele Salmaso, 3 years ago

Description: modified (diff)

Hi all, what is the status of this ticket?
FileField behaviour is not really clear right now and flake8-django just made a change to allow FileField(null=True) (see https://github.com/rocioar/flake8-django/issues/82), which seems wrong to me.

I'm for option 2 make FileField behave exactly like CharField wrt. null.

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