I want to let users to download a specific file, by clicking on a button "Download". The button will be linked with many switchers, so I wrote a JS script that change the "href" tag to point to the correct static file.
I tried to follow many stackoverflow questions and read documentation about Django staticfiles, media files but did not understand what I need to do on my case. Any help would be really appreciated, let me please introduce what I did and ask for your help/opinion.
I want to let people download files that can be found in :
"/home/user/xxxx/xxx/project/my_app/static/"
Here is my function in views.py :
def send_file(request,file_name):
from django.contrib.staticfiles.storage import staticfiles_storage
import os
from wsgiref.util import FileWrapper
import mimetypes
filename = staticfiles_storage.url(file_name)
download_name = file_name
wrapper = FileWrapper(open(filename))
content_type = mimetypes.guess_type(filename)[0]
response = HttpResponse(wrapper, content_type=content_type)
response['Content-Length'] = os.path.getsize(filename)
response['Content-Disposition'] = "attachment; filename=%s" % download_name
return response
I need the exact path to open the file, so what I have done is that I defined on my settings STATIC_URL = "/home/user/xxxx/xxx/project/my_app/static/"
. I do not like this solution, because after it, if you check my source, you have the exact path of my project. If I defined STATIC_URL = "static/" it does not work. I looked for a way to get exact path for the static file but it did not work. Any help for this part ?
urls.py:
url(r'^download/static/(?P<file_name>[\w.]{0,256})$',views.send_file, name='send_file'),
template.html, only the button part :
<a href="#" class="button" id="dl-link">Download</a>
JS, only the part that when you click on a switcher, it changes the href tag of the HTML button :
"if you click on a switcher"
id = switcher-checked
var atag = document.getElementById("dl-link");
var url = "http://localhost:8000/test/download/static/"+id+".csv";
atag.setAttribute("href",url);
Is there a solution to use the {% url 'my_app:send_file %} tag in my JS ? I found that one solution is to put the script directly within "template.html", is it a good behaviour ?
My downloading is working perfectly, but I feel like all my choices are pretty bad (STATIC_URL and JS var url definition). I know that my question is quite dense, but I really need this help. Any examples would be more than appreciated. Thank you.
Couple of points. first one for STATIC_URL you can use "/static/" with starting and ending with slash instead of complete path. since you are trying download from same domain name no need to use complete URL "http://localhost:8000/your-url". You can simply use "/your-url" in js var url variable.
Django cannot render js files, so we have only one option, keeping it in template.html. For better maintaining of js code, try declaring global variable with urls in the template on document load and use them in your script. So that script part will be clear. for ex,
var all_my_urls = {
"url":"{% url 'my_app:send_file'%}"
}