More than just admin widget integration?

[mrmachine]

I'd like to create a new file/image library app that does more than just provide a browser and enhanced admin form widgets for file/image selection and upload.

I'd like the library to store additional metadata like alt text, cache file size (useful when using S3 storage backend and querying file size on a list of files is slow) and type, etc.

I'd like to either contribute, an integration class to django-any-imagefield or for django-any-imagefield to have some better hooks that would allow me to use a private integration class (e.g. import the backend class from a setting).

My image/file library would use a storage name field as its primary key, and provide a descriptor on the resulting FieldFile object that is returned when you access foo.my_file_field, that would lookup the corresponding metadata from the library via foo.my_file_field.name.

I just wanted to check in with you if this sounds feasible and worthwhile, and if you could point out any likely pitfalls I might encounter?

[mrmachine]

To clarify, that would be a single descriptor on my AnyFileField backend class, called metadata or library, that would lookup the corresponding object from the library, so I could do things like foo.my_file_field.metadata.size, foo.my_image_field.metadata.alt_text, etc.

[vdboor]

Hi,

Yes, adding a new library that uses foreign keys is no problem at all. We've added django-filer support too. It does mean through that new projects should choose the file browser type beforehand, much like AUTH_USER_MODEL because it affects initial migrations.