Question

I’m writing a tool that monitors an external api and verifies that it works as documented.

Basically I have two models:

ServerTest, which has a url and a string of json that we expect the target server to return for that url

and

TestResult which has a foreign key relationship with ServerTest, a string containing the server’s actual response, and a timestamp for when the test occurred.

Periodically, the app will run through each ServerTest, ping the TargetServer, and create a new TestResult instance for each ServerTest.

Now what I want to do is view a json diff between the actual and expected json. I was thinking I might use this widget: http://tlrobinson.net/projects/javascript-fun/jsondiff/. I was also thinking I might embed that widget in the django admin. The problem is, in order to generate the diff I need to access both the ServerTest instance and the latest corresponding TestResult instance. It doesn’t seem like there’s a straight-forward way to do this through django admin. Should I give up and just make a separate view? I’d rather not do that, because I feel like I would keep adding functionality to that view until I had reimplemented half of the django admin interface.

To recap I need to:

1) Access a ServerTest instance

2) Access a TestResult instance

3) Add an html container (say, on the ServerTest admin page)

4) Run some javascript that has access to the currently viewed ServerTest’s expected_json and the latest corresponding TestResult’s actual_json

5) Have that javascript dynamically inject html into the aforementioned container

Answer 1

Since you’re injecting html anyway, i would do a simple view, that generates diff you need, and then call it inside admin page.

In order to add custom JS in admin, you can use ModelAdmin Media