Generating Diffs

A common problem when dealing with version-controlled text is generating diffs to highlight changes between different versions.

django-reversion comes with a number of helper functions that make generating diffs easy. They all rely on the google-diff-match-patch library, so make sure you have this installed before trying to use the functions.

Low-Level API

It is possible to generate two types of diff using the diff helper functions. For the purpose of these examples, it is assumed that you have created a model called Page, which contains a text field called content.

First of all, you need to use the Low Level API to retrieve the versions you want to compare.

from reversion.helpers import generate_patch

# Get the page object to generate diffs for.
page = Page.objects.all()[0]

# Get the two versions to compare.
available_versions = Version.objects.get_for_object(page)

old_version = available_versions[0]
new_version = available_versions[1]

Now, in order to generate a text patch:

from reversion.helpers import generate_patch

patch = generate_patch(old_version, new_version, "content")

Or, to generate a pretty HTML patch:

from reversion.helpers import generate_patch_html

patch_html = generate_patch_html(old_version, new_version, "content")

Admin Integration

The admin integration for django-reversion does not currently support diff generation. This is a deliberate design decision, as it would make the framework a lot more heavyweight, as well as carrying the risk of confusing non-technical end users.

While future versions may support a more advanced admin class, for the time being it is left up to your own imagination for ways in which to integrate diffs with your project.