Appropriateness of a Django Textfield in a Model

Question

I have a field in a model that I want users to feel like they can write an arbitrary amount of text in. Django provides a CharField and a TextField in the models. I assume that the difference is that one of them is a char(max_length) and the other is a varchar internally.

I am tempted to use the TextField, but since it doesn't respect max_length, I am somewhat wary of someone dumping loads of data into it and DOSing my server. How should I deal with this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Fields in model only represent the way data is stored in database.

You can very easily enforce maximum length in form which will validate users' input. Like this.

class InputForm(forms.Form):
    text = forms.CharField(max_length=16384, widget=forms.TextArea)
    ...

This will make sure the maximum length user can successfully enter is 16k.