How do you store a "blob" of binary data using Django's ORM, with a PostgreSQL backend? Yes, I know Django frowns upon that sort of thing, and yes, I know they prefer you use the ImageField or FileField for that, but suffice it to say, that's impractical for my application.
I've tried hacking it by using a TextField, but I get occassional errors when my binary data doesn't strictly confirm to the models encoding type, which is unicode by default. e.g.
psycopg2.DataError: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xe22665
This snippet any good:
http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1597/
This is possibly the simplest solution for storing binary data in a
TextField.
import base64
from django.db import models
class Foo(models.Model):
_data = models.TextField(
db_column='data',
blank=True)
def set_data(self, data):
self._data = base64.encodestring(data)
def get_data(self):
return base64.decodestring(self._data)
data = property(get_data, set_data)
There's a couple of other snippets there that might help.
If you're using Django >= 1.6, there's a BinaryField
I have been using this simple field for 'mysql' backend, you can modify it for other backends
class BlobField(models.Field):
description = "Blob"
def db_type(self, connection):
return 'blob'
Also, check out Django Storages' Database Storage:.
I haven't used it yet, but it looks awesome and I'm going to start using it as soon as I Post My Answer.