I've written an app that uses forms to collect information that is then sent in an email. Many of these forms have a filefield used to attach files to the email. I'd like to validate two things, the size of the file (to ensure the emails are accepted by our mail server. I'd also like to check the file extension, to discourage attaching file types not useable for our users. (This is the python class I'm trying to extend) class FileField(Field): widget = FileInput default_error_messages = { 'invalid': _(u"No file was submitted. Check the encoding type on the form."), 'missing': _(u"No file was submitted."), 'empty': _(u"The submitted file is empty."), 'max_length': _(u'Ensure this filename has at most %(max)d characters (it has %(length)d).'), } def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): self.max_length = kwargs.pop('max_length', None) super(FileField, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs) def clean(self, data, initial=None): super(FileField, self).clean(initial or data) if not self.required and data in EMPTY_VALUES: return None elif not data and initial: return initial # UploadedFile objects should have name and size attributes. try: file_name = data.name file_size = data.size except AttributeError: raise ValidationError(self.error_messages['invalid']) if self.max_length is not None and len(file_name) > self.max_length: error_values = {'max': self.max_length, 'length': len(file_name)} raise ValidationError(self.error_messages['max_length'] % error_values) if not file_name: raise ValidationError(self.error_messages['invalid']) if not file_size: raise ValidationError(self.error_messages['empty']) return data