A number of people have kindly posted snippets on how to use pdb/ipdb with django. However, this only works when running the django development server.
I thought it would be nice to have a trace() command that would turn into a no-op when the development server is not running, so you wouldn't have to worry about leaving trace() commands in your code if you want to quickly test with mod_wsgi or mod_python.
The code above attempts (on Posix-like systems) to determine if the development server is running (by quickly checking if "manage.py runserver" is in the process list), and sets a DJANGO_SERVER setting appropriately. Then when you import the trace() method, it is defined as set_trace() if DJANGO_SERVER is True, or a no-op if DJANGO_SERVER is False.
When you hit the trace() in pdb/ipdb, enter "u" to go up to the calling trace() statement.
The "testdata" tag allows you to inline test data into your templates, similar in spirit to Python doctests. There are two sections--the test data and the actual template to be rendered. In non-test mode your template renders normally from whatever views call it, and there is very little overhead to skip over the test data section (happens at parse time).
Here are the goals:
1. Provide convenient way to test templates without surrounding infrastructure.
2. Make templates be self-documenting in terms of expected data.
3. Allow insertion of test data at arbitrary places in template structure.
Hello-world looks like this:
{% load handytags %}
{% testdata %}
{
'greeting': 'Hello',
'planet': 'World',
}
{% --- %}
{# This is where the actual template begins #}
{{ greeting }} <b>{{ planet }}</b>
{% endtestdata %}
To invoke it, set up urls.py with something like this:
url(r'^testdata/(?P<template_path>.*)', test_template)
def test_template(request, template_path):
context = {'testdata_use': True}
# put request vars into context to help choose
# which test data we want to render
for field in request.GET:
context[field] = request.GET[field]
return render_with_request(template_path, context, request)
Then call:
http://127.0.0.1:8000/testdata/hello_world.html
Features:
1. The testdata tag's rendering will expose missing variables a bit more aggressively than Django normally does.
2. You have the full power of the template language to set the test data (which ultimately gets eval'ed as a Python expression).
3. As mentioned above, the tag is mostly unobtrusive.
Limitations/caveats:
1. Right now the only data format I support is pure Python, but the tag could be modified pretty easily to support JSON or YAML.
2. The VerboseContext class is pretty heavy-handed--I really just want a hook into Django to tell it to render a section with more strictness about variables. Suggestions welcome.
3. You can put the testdata tag pretty much anywhere, but the normal rules apply...for example, if you are in a template that has the extend tag, you'll want
to put the testdata tag in individual blocks.
- templates
- testing
- doctest
- custom-template-tag