Drupal6: I need to customize file upload links in node edit form

Question

I am customizing the node/add and node/edit forms of a content type with a form_alter. In my content type, there is a file field that permits to upload files to the content.
What I would like to do is to customize the file box by changing the link to the file that is composed at runtime with Ajax. How can I do it without modifying Drupal core?

Answer 1

Your Private Files directory should not be in the docroot. Hiding it with a .htaccess rule will not work, as you point out in a comment.

Say you have Drupal in /var/www/sites/example.com/, then you should not store your private files under that directory; /var/www/sites/example.com/sites/default/private/files/ is just plain wrong.

You should, instead store the files where apache will not serve them, but can read them. E.g. in /var/www/files/example.com/. Then change the setting in Drupal to use that absolute path.

If you are running a large(r) site, you will probably want to store your files on a dedicated mount (drive, NFS etc.), say /media/nfs-example-com/.

Answer 2

Try Filefield Paths:

The FileField Paths module extends the default functionality of Drupals core Upload module, the FileField module and many other File Upload modules by adding the ability to use node tokens in destination paths and filenames.

http://drupal.org/project/filefield_paths