Camelot provides some features for the management of documents. Notice that documents managed by Camelot are stored in a specific location (either an application directory on the local disk, a network share or a remote server).
This in contrast with some application that just store the link to a file in the database, and don’t store the file itself.
Three concepts are important for understanding how Camelot handles documents :
- The Storage : this is the place where Camelot stores its documents, by default this is a directory on the local system. When a file is checked in into a storage, a StoredFile is returned. Files are checked out from the storage by their StoredFile representation.
- The StoredFile : a stored file is a representation of a file stored in a storage. It does not contain the file itself but its name and meta information.
- The File Field type : is a custom field type to write and read the StoredFile into the database. The actual name of the StoredFile is the only thing stored in the database.
Usually the first step when working with documents is to use the File field type somewhere in the model definition. Alternatively the Image field type can be used if one only wants to store images in that field.
When the File field type is used in the code, it returns and accepts objects of type StoredFile.
The Image field type will return objects of type StoredImage.
This is where the actual file is stored. The default storage implementation simply represents a directory on the file system.