Even though I have upload functionality in a few other places, I still got bit by a few gotchas when dealing with uploaded files. First of all, you have to construct your <form> tag with an additional encoding type attribute:

<form action="." method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">

And on the server side, when validating the received POST arguments and files, you must bind the uploaded files to the form:

f = MyForm(request.POST, request.FILES)

Even though I’ve done this before multiple times, and it is clearly documented in the Django docs, I forgot these steps which caused a few minutes of confusion. I guess I am getting cocky now.

The really fun thing I got working is an AJAX style rating system to let people rate downloads. So now I have something similar to the YouTube.com “star” rating system. My progress was aided by this excellent tutorial at progressive-coding.com. The tutorial shows the steps to write the system in vanilla Javascript, then shows how to integrate it with several Javascript frameworks at the end. Since I’m using jQuery, I took the ideas there and wrote the whole thing with jQuery in mind, resulting in smaller code. I’m glad I took the time to study the tutorial and fashion it into my own making, as I learned a great deal by doing it. I was really impressed, again, by how easy jQuery makes these things. I will likely go over what I came up with in greater detail in a future post.

Now that I have this rating system in place, I think I will add a feature to limit the number of votes you can make on an item. I’m thinking of allowing a user to vote on a download once a week. It is so easy to vote now, just by a single click, that I’m sure people would be tempted to vote multiple times. I may go add something like this to the polls application too.