Filepicker.io and South

I've heard good things about filepicker.io, which is a service that makes file uploading a much better experience. Unfortunately, the Django package for filepicker.io doesn't work with South. When I try to create a migration using the filepicker.io field using code like the following...

# products/models.py
from django.db import models
from django_filepicker.models import FPFileField

class Product(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    file = FPFileField(upload_to='uploads')

...when I try to run the command:

(tsd)$ python manage.py schemamigration products --initial

It results in this unpleasant looking response:

(tsd)$ python manage.py schemamigration products --initial
Creating migrations directory at '/Users/danielgreenfeld/code/tsp/tsp/products/migrations'...
Creating __init__.py in '/Users/danielgreenfeld/code/tsp/tsp/products/migrations'...
 ! Cannot freeze field 'products.product.fpfile'
 ! (this field has class django_filepicker.models.FPFileField)
 ! Cannot freeze field 'products.release.fpfile'
 ! (this field has class django_filepicker.models.FPFileField)

 ! South cannot introspect some fields; this is probably because they are custom
 ! fields. If they worked in 0.6 or below, this is because we have removed the
 ! models parser (it often broke things).
 ! To fix this, read https://south.aeracode.org/wiki/MyFieldsDontWork

The last line in the error report is important. I'll repeat it to illustrate it more clearly:

! To fix this, read https://south.aeracode.org/wiki/MyFieldsDontWork

Experience working on other projects has taught me I can simply add two lines of code to products/models.py and everything should just work:

# South migration rules for the FPFileField field
from south.modelsinspector import add_introspection_rules
add_introspection_rules([], ["django_filepicker.models.FPFileField"])

In case it's not clear, here's my new products/models.py file:

# products/models.py
from django.db import models
from django_filepicker.models import FPFileField

# South migration rules for the FPFileField field
from south.modelsinspector import add_introspection_rules
add_introspection_rules([], ["django_filepicker.models.FPFileField"])

class Product(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    file = FPFileField(upload_to='uploads')

Now I can create South migrations and they'll just work.

Unfortunately, the problem is that for any model where I need to use filepicker's FPFileField I need to add those two lines of code. I don't like this approach, since it violates Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY).

At some point I'll demonstrate how to fix this violation of DRY with an easy fix. In fact, I plan submit that fix as a pull request to django-filepicker.

Update 2013/12/24: django-filepicker has been patched to address this issue. This blog post therefore describes a historical version of the package.