picker_config.rst

Creating Custom Pickers

File Picker offers many ways to create custom pickers and assign them to your own models.

The FilePickerBase Class

The base file picker class has a mixture of class based views and helper functions for building the colorbox on the page. File pickers should be included in the file_pickers.py file in the root directory of any app so that the auto-discovery process can find it.

Attributes

Each picker can take a set of attributes for easy customization.:

from myapp.models import CustomModel
from myapp.forms import CustomForm
import file_pickers

class CustomPicker(file_picker.FilePickerBase):
    form = CustomForm
    page_size = 4
    link_headers = ['Insert File',]
    columns = ['name', 'body', 'description',]
    extra_headers = ['Name', 'Body', 'Description',]
    ordering = '-date'

file_picker.site.register(CustomModel, CustomPicker, name='custom')

None of these attributes are required and they all have sane defaults.

• form- If left blank is created by building a ModelForm from the model defined in the register function. It is used to build the form on the Upload tab.
• link_headers- Defines the headers for the first set of columns which are used to insert content into the textbox or WYSIWYG of your choice. By default it converts _ to ' ' and capitalizes first letter of the fields name.
• columns- Defines the fields you want to be included on the listing page and their ordering.
• extra_headers- The list is used to define the headers for the columns and needs to be in the same order as columns.
• ordering- Defines the order of items on the listing page in to be used as query_set.order_by('-date').

Methods

The three main methods consist of append, list, and upload_file. List and upload_file take in the request object and act as views while append takes in an model item and helps build the JSON output for list. Other methods are available but typically do not need to be modified.

append(obj)

This method takes in obj which is a item from the model and outputs a dictionary to be used by list. This dictoinary is of the form.:

{
    'name': 'Name for the object.',
    'url': 'The url to the file.',
    'extra': {
        'column_name_1': 'value',
        'column_name_2': 'value',
    },
    'insert': ['string/html to insert if first link is clicked', 'for second link',],
    'link_content': ['string to show on first insert link', 'for second link',],
}

As a note the link_content list and insert list must be the same length, as well as the extra dictionary and the link_headers attribute.

list(request)

This takes in a request object and outputs.:

{
    'page': Integer of current,
    'pages': List of pages,
    'search': The current search term,
    'result': List returned from ,
    'has_next': Lets the paginator know whether to hide/show the next button.,
    'has_previous': Same as above for previous button.,
    'link_headers': List of link headers either generated or defined by the attribute.,
    'extra_headers': List of the extra headers made in the same we as above.,
    'columns': List of column names to be included(same as the columns attribute.),
}

upload_file(request)

Builds the upload file form and is used to upload files in two steps, file first then the other form parameters.

If called without a POST it returns a JSON dictionary with the key form with an html block for the form.

If called with a file and then with the post, it's a two step process. If the form passed on the second step it returns the result of append for the object which was just created.