Debug doesn't catch exception instead complains views does not exist

[yeukhon]

Suppose we have this forms.py:

class SubmitButtonField(forms.Field):
     # here we write a custom field....

class Editor(forms.Form):
    script_name = forms.CharField(max_length=60, min_length=1)
    view_level = forms.ChoiceField(widget=forms.widgets.RadioSelect, choices=VIEW_LEVEL)
    text_box = forms.CharField(widget=forms.widgets.Textarea, required=False)
    save_button = forms.SubmitButtonField(required=False)

    # notice save_button above....

Notice that save_button has an error. I accidentally added forms. in the beginning. This is invalid, and Python will raise exception.

However, when we try to visit the page, it complains about myapp.views.view_name does not exist.
I fired up django shell, and when I import myapp.views I got this error:

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SubmitButtonField'

Django debug page does not really catch this kind of exception. Is this a bug or an enactment-to-be-made?

[Aymeric Augustin]

Replaced the link to a paste site with the actual content, in case the past site disappears.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Indeed, this is raising an AttributeError, which is caught in django.core.urlresolvers.get_callable(). A completely different exception is then raised.

Django (generally) shouldn't mask exceptions.

[Grzegorz Nosek]

How can I reproduce it?

# app18418/forms.py
from django import forms

class SubmitButtonField(forms.Field):
    pass

class AForm(forms.Form):
    save_button = forms.SubmitButtonField(required=False)

# cat app18418/views.py
import app18418.forms

def a_view(request):
    form = app18418.forms.AForm()

# app18418/urls.py
from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url
from django.contrib import admin

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^$', 'app18418.views.a_view', name='home'),
)

Visiting / properly raises the exception:

AttributeError at /
'module' object has no attribute 'SubmitButtonField'

[Grzegorz Nosek]

It's already fixed by:

commit 367bfaa5226eaae3278989e63f16063d5cc46cd8
Author: Florian Apolloner <florian@apolloner.eu>
Date:   Tue Aug 14 21:12:08 2012 +0200

    Don't swallow AttributeError in core.urlresolvers.get_callable.

which made its way into 1.5