Make your own view

DownloadMixin

The django_downloadview.views.DownloadMixin class is not a view. It is a base class which you can inherit of to create custom download views.

DownloadMixin is a base of BaseDownloadView, which itself is a base of all other django_downloadview’s builtin views.

BaseDownloadView

The django_downloadview.views.BaseDownloadView class is a base class to create download views. It inherits DownloadMixin and django.views.generic.base.View.

The only thing it does is to implement get: it triggers DownloadMixin's render_to_response.

Serving a file inline rather than as attachment

Use attachment to make a view serve a file inline rather than as attachment, i.e. to display the file as if it was an internal part of a page rather than triggering “Save file as…” prompt.

See details in attachment API documentation.

from django_downloadview import ObjectDownloadView

#: Serve ``file`` attribute of ``Document`` model, inline (not as attachment).

Handling http not modified responses

Sometimes, you know the latest date and time the content was generated at, and you know a new request would generate exactly the same content. In such a case, you should implement was_modified_since() in your view.

Note

Default was_modified_since() implementation trusts file wrapper’s was_modified_since if any. Else (if calling was_modified_since() raises NotImplementedError or AttributeError) it returns True, i.e. it assumes the file was modified.

As an example, the download views above always generate “Hello world!”… so, if the client already downloaded it, we can safely return some HTTP “304 Not Modified” response:

from django.core.files.base import ContentFile
from django_downloadview import VirtualDownloadView

class TextDownloadView(VirtualDownloadView):
    def get_file(self):
        """Return :class:`django.core.files.base.ContentFile` object."""
        return ContentFile("Hello world!", name='hello-world.txt')

    def was_modified_since(self, file_instance, since):
        return False  # Never modified, always "Hello world!".