Download views

This section contains narrative overview about class-based views provided by django-downloadview.

By default, all of those views would stream the file to the client. But keep in mind that you can setup Optimizations to delegate actual streaming to a reverse proxy.

ObjectDownloadView

The django_downloadview.views.ObjectDownloadView class-based view allows you to serve files given a model with some file fields such as FileField or ImageField.

Use this view anywhere you could use Django’s builtin ObjectDetailView.

Some options allow you to store file metadata (size, content-type, ...) in the model, as deserialized fields.

StorageDownloadView

The django_downloadview.views.StorageDownloadView class-based view allows you to serve files given a storage and a path.

Use this view when you manage files in a storage (which is a good practice), unrelated to a model.

PathDownloadView

The django_downloadview.views.PathDownloadView class-based view allows you to serve files given an absolute path on local filesystem.

Two main use cases:

• as a shortcut. This dead-simple view is straight to call, so you can use it to simplify code in more complex views, provided you have an absolute path to a local file.
• override. Extend django_downloadview.views.PathDownloadView and override django_downloadview.views.PathDownloadView:get_path().

HTTPDownloadView

The django_downloadview.views.HTTPDownloadView class-based view allows you to serve files given an URL. That URL is supposed to be downloadable from the Django server.

Use it when you want to setup a proxy to remote files:

• the Django view filters input and computes target URL.
• if you setup optimizations, Django itself doesn’t proxies the file,
• but, as a fallback, Django uses requests [1] to proxy the file.

Extend django_downloadview.views.HTTPDownloadView then override django_downloadview.views.HTTPDownloadView:get_url().

VirtualDownloadView

The django_downloadview.views.VirtualDownloadView class-based view allows you to serve files that don’t live on disk.

Use it when you want to stream a file which content is dynamically generated or which lives in memory.

References

[1]	https://pypi.python.org/pypi/requests