Document the template language's silencing of TypeError

[Robin]

Say I create myapp/admin.py which contains:

from django.contrib import admin
from myapp.models import MyModel

class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    
    list_display = ('pk','abc')

    def abc(self, user):
        return 999+None

admin.site.register(MyModel, MyModelAdmin)

Then when you visit ​http://localhost:8000/admin/myapp/mymodel/ a TypeError will raise because you cannot add 999 and None together. This is the expected outcome.

However if I add templates/admin/myapp/mymodel/change_list.html which contains:

{% extends "admin/change_list.html" %}

{% block content %}
    {{ block.super }}
{% endblock %}

The TypeError will not appear and the page renders but without any content, which is not the expected outcome.

This ticket seems similar to https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/18169

[Baptiste Mispelon]

I made a small template tag and managed to reproduced the issue easily: ​https://gist.github.com/bmispelon/6031523

Note that only TypeError seems to trigger the bug (I tested with KeyError or AttributeError and they're both propagated correctly).

Digging a bit deeper, it seems this is a regression introduced by 4397c587a43ff9bfddd295d48d850676778c6e77.

[anonymous]

This actually works for me on trunk/master using bmispelon's gist, so it should have been fixed in some point between 1.6 or 1.7. The only change i did to the gist was using __builtin__ instead of builtins for python2.7 compatibility. I also tried raising a simple TypeError.

I'm marking this a closed, reopen if it's still happening.

[Aymeric Augustin]

I'm not aware of any fixes in this area over the last week. Since it was reproduced by a core dev and not reproduced by an anonymous I'd rather err on the side of caution until we get a third opinion.

[Baptiste Mispelon]

Just tried it again and the issue is indeed still present.

Note that if you used the code from my earlier comment, the way to test if the issue is still present is to try and render the bar.html template.
The correct behavior is that rendering this template should raise a TypeError.
As of now (1.7, 1.6 or 1.5), no exception is raised, which is what the original report describes.

I should have provided an actual testcase but I couldn't find how to register a template library for a test.

[Baptiste Mispelon]

After some digging, I think I'm starting to understand what's happening here.

When django finds a callable element in a template (which {{ block.super }} is, since it refers to a BlockNode's super method), it attempts to call it (without passing any argument), wrapping the calling in a try/except and catching a TypeError (which happens when you call a function/method without enough arguments).

In our case, a TypeError is raised from inside the function and subsequently caught and silenced in the except clause.

Before 4397c587a43ff9bfddd295d48d850676778c6e77, any exception raised while rendering a template would be wrapped in a TemplateSyntaxError.
This TemplateSyntaxError would then not be caught by the aforementionned except TypeError clause and would bubble up.
Note that this would only happen with settings.TEMPLATE_DEBUG = True (this discrepancy between the two values of TEMPLATE_DEBUG is actually one of the reason why this change was introduced in the first place).

This is therefore a limitation of django's implementation, which stems from the fact that it can't distinguish between a TypeError caused by calling a function without enough arguments and a TypeError raised from inside the function.
This limitation is noted in a comment in the code [1], but as far as I can tell, it's not documented.

I'm leaving this ticket open but I see it as a documentation issue, unless someone can come up with a clever way of side-stepping the problem but I'm not sure there is one.

Since this details is somehow technical, I think a good place for it would be this section: ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/ref/templates/api/#variables-and-lookups

[1] ​https://github.com/django/django/blob/028db9750357d504c55a7ac686c9abaa3c847ac6/django/template/base.py#L791-L794

[Aymeric Augustin]

We can distinguish between the two kinds of TypeError with ​inspect.getcallargs.

We recently did it to fix a similar problem in django/contrib/auth/__init__.py.

[Baptiste Mispelon]

Interesting, I didn't know about getcallargs.

Here's a pull request that uses it to let TypeError bubble up when it needs to:

​https://github.com/django/django/pull/1602

[Baptiste Mispelon <bmispelon@…>]

In 28a571348bca9c5a3c137e495e7d3c9349a5bd56:

Fix #20745: Don't silence TypeError raised inside templates.

Thanks to robin for the report and claudep for the review.

[pczerkas@…]

inspect.getcallargs is unavailable in Python 2.6

[Baptiste Mispelon]

Hi,

The fix for this issue will be part of the 1.7 release which only supports versions of Python above 2.7 [1] so this shouldn't be a problem.

[1] ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.7/#python-compatibility