Django Template Introspection

Did you ever had a web project which gave you hard times to find which bit of code generates the output? This project is developed with an idea to help a developer in finding exact view(function) and template wich were used to generat every HTML tag in a resulting output.

And yes, it allows you to find the roots of all your content on a page visually in a browser:

Installation

• Download the source, add drop django_template_introspection somewhere in the python path
• Add django_template_introspection to the INSTALLED_APPS and django_template_introspection.middleware.TemplateIntrospect to the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES. For example, drop this to your settings.py somewhere to the very bottom (better to your settings-local.py):

DTI_DEBUG = True
if DTI_DEBUG:
    MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES += ('django_template_introspection.middleware.TemplateIntrospect',)
    INSTALLED_APPS += ('django_template_introspection',)

Done! Next, you can:

• Investigate the HTML output in your browser
• Find out where each HTML tag was generated (its template & view function)

Notes

• Requires jQuery which is taken from a CDN, so it requires connection to Internet. Easy to fix

TODO

• clean-up js code (replace pop-up plugin?)
• preserve the order of templates inclusion in the resulting output (is it a js problem?)
• override the template-tag generator to mark template-tags in the inspection output also. They are processed during a template rendering and therefore are not currently highlighted. However, they are distinct chunks of code and have to be shown separately.

Credits

• using jGrowl for nice pop-ups
• using js code borrowed from galambalazs for highliting and selecting HTML-elements
• the idea of creating this module was offered by askalyuk