Simplify form submission in Django

Question

I have a form in Django where the user can submit a file/ an image/ text in a single form as follows.

<form id="send-form" action="{% url 'chat:message' context.room_id %}"  method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
            {% csrf_token %}
            <table style="width: 100%">
                <input type="hidden" name="from" value="{{ user }}">
                <input type="hidden" name="next" value="{{ request.path }}">
                <tr style="width: 100%">
                    <td style="width: 50%">
                        <input type="text" id="chat-input" autocomplete="off" placeholder="Say something" name="text" id="text"/>
                    </td>
                    <td style="width: 16%">
                        <input type="file" name="image" accept="image/*" id="image">
                    </td>
                    <td style="width: 16%">
                        <input type="file" name="file" accept="image/*" id="file">
                    </td>
                    <td style="width: 16%">
                        <input type="submit" id="chat-send-button" value="Send" />

                    </td>
                </tr>
            </table>
        </form>

In views.py, the form has to be submitted even if any of the three inputs is missing i.e, even if user submits only text/ only image/only file, the data has to be uploaded into database and I have written using try and except in the following way:

def messages(request, room_id):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        try:
            img = request.FILES['image']
        except:
            img = None
        try:
            text = request.POST['text']
        except:
            text = None
        try:
            file = request.FILES['file']
        except:
            file = None
        path = request.POST['next']
        fields = [img,file,text]
    ChatMessage.objects.create(room=room,user=mfrom,text=text,document=file,image=img)

Is there any other better way to do it. The code looks not so good with all the try excepts.

Use `.get()`, it returns the value if the key exists otherwise `None` which is essentially what you are doing but in one method call and without a try/except: `img = request.FILES.get('image')` — Iain Shelvington, Feb 13 '21 at 14:40

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 13 '21 at 16:04

A nicer approach could be use the get, in case of the key is not present in the dictionaty, will return the second argument without raise an exception here a nice answer on this topic -> link

def messages(request, room_id):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = UploadFileForm(request.POST, request.FILES) # replace UploadFileForm with your form name
        if form.is_valid(): # just check if the form is valid, i don't know if you are doing it before
            img = request.FILES.get('image', None)
            text  = request.FILES.get('text', None)
            file  = request.FILES.get('file', None)
            path = request.POST['next']
            fields = [img, file, text]
        ChatMessage.objects.create(
            room=room, 
            user=mfrom,
            text=text,
            document=file,
            image=img
        )
        else:
            return render(request, 'upload.html', {'form': form})

It's a draft, but of course is always a good approach to redirect the user back to the form in case the form is not valid

Simplify form submission in Django

1 Answers1

Linked