Recently I was writing code to interact with a third-party API. The API changes frequently, especially the data contained in responses. However, that data has to be saved and periodically needs to be audited. I wanted a data model flexible enough to handle these periodic changes without a lot of anguish, yet queryable. Since the API serves out queryable JSON, this made it a no-brainer for using django.contrib.postgres 's JSONField.

After a little bit of work, I had data samples to play with. Quickly my admin filled with chunks of JSON that looked something like this:

{ "field_12" : 8 , "field_16" : 4 , "field_6" : 14 , "field_7" : 13 , "field_18" : 2 , "field_2" : 18 , "field_4" : 16 , "field_15" : 5 , "field_9" : 11 , "field_3" : 17 , "field_8" : 12 , "field_11" : 9 , "field_17" : 3 , "field_10" : 10 , "field_0" : 20 , "field_1" : 19 , "field_13" : 7 , "field_5" : 15 , "field_14" : 6 }

Kind of illegible, right? And that's a simple, flat example with just 20 keys. Imagine if this were a nested dictionary with 100 or 200 fields. For reference, that's the kind of data that I had that makes this kind of display nigh useless.

So I cooked up this quick fix:

import json from pygments import highlight from pygments . lexers import JsonLexer from pygments . formatters import HtmlFormatter from django . contrib import admin from django . utils . safestring import mark_safe from . models import APIData class APIDataAdmin ( admin . ModelAdmin ) : readonly_fields = ( 'data_prettified' , ) def data_prettified ( self , instance ) : """Function to display pretty version of our data""" response = json . dumps ( instance . data , sort_keys = True , indent = 2 ) response = response [ : 5000 ] formatter = HtmlFormatter ( style = 'colorful' ) response = highlight ( response , JsonLexer ( ) , formatter ) style = "<style>" + formatter . get_style_defs ( ) + "</style><br>" return mark_safe ( style + response ) data_prettified . short_description = 'data prettified' admin . site . register ( APIData , APIDataAdmin )

The field remains the same, but we also get a display of nicely formatted data:

]

Much better!

There may be a package out there that does this already, perhaps even using a JavaScript library like hightlight.js instead of pygments. If not, it shouldn't be hard to create one using Cookiecutter Django Package. Let me know if you package this and I'll add it to this blog post.

# See you at PyCon!

I'll be at PyCon with Audrey Roy Greenfeld. You can easily find us at the Cookiecutter booth during the main conference days or at the Cookiecutter sprint . Stop by and say hi!