[Fixed]-Request.FILES always empty on file upload

Check that you have added enctype property into form tag.

Example from official docs:
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" action="/foo/">

I had this problem too and was puzzling over it for a while. My error was the same — that I was missing necessary fields on the input field.

In order to see what the actually required fields are, a very nice thing to do is, in this case:

from base.forms import DocumentForm ## or put whatever the name is of the app, which is unspecified in the question
print DocumentForm()

This will print the html that you need, including all the tags that this object requires. Very neat functionality which I missed the first time, but which is outlined in the docs.

<input type="file" id="grade_csv" name="name" />

You have to add name to your input field.

Two things to make sure of here:

1. Form tag should contain attribute "enctype="multipart/form-data"
2. Each file field should have a "name" attribute

I just encountered a weird bug where it shows as empty when I print it out:

print(request.FILES)
# Prints <MultiValueDict: {}>

If I load up a debugger and actually inspect the object though, it’s not empty and contains the data I was expecting. This is the same exact object in both cases. The debugger shows FILES as populated, then when I continue, print shows it as empty.

So, if you’re like me and you wanted to poke at the object first to understand it a bit, maybe don’t rely on MultiValueDict‘s string representation. I can’t explain the source of the bug though since MultiValueDict is just subclass of dict and uses dict‘s __str__.