Multiple calls to static files for django-prose-editor when registering to admin

[jsa34]

Hello,

I have created a custom ProseEditorField to use in my code:

class CustomProseEditorField(ProseEditorField):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        kwargs.setdefault(
            "extensions",
            {
                "Bold": True,
                "Italic": True,
                "Underline": True,
                "BulletList": True,
                "OrderedList": True,
                "HardBreak": True,
                "Link": {
                    "enableTarget": True,
                },
                "Heading": {"levels": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]},
                "History": True,
                "HTML": False,
            },
        )
        kwargs.setdefault("sanitize", True)

        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

which I am using for all the model fields that need to use rich text.

I have one model with a very large number of fields, many of which are using CustomProseEditorField. Upon registering the model for admin and opening the model admin, it shows in a large number of calls when looking at Django debug toolbar to fetch the static resources. Is there a way to avoid this and make a single call for each required resource (such as editor.js and configurable.js) when opening this model in the model admin? I haven't customised or called the widgets in anyway and only setting the prose editor as described above.

I hope this makes sense!

Many thanks in advance.

[matthiask]

Hi @jsa34

Thanks for the ticket. I wonder what's going on? Assets are embedded via <script type="module"> so they really should be fetched and evaluated only once by the webbrowser? Also, I'm using forms.Media which also deduplicates media entries. Can you check if the editor.js file is embedded several times?

This is how it looks here:

And as expected, configurable.js, editor.js and friends are only loaded once:

[matthiask]

Ah sorry, you're talking about the django debug toolbar staticfiles panel? The panel registers calls to static() -- they do indeed happen multiple times, but assets are still only fetched once. Or at least I think so.

[jsa34]

Duh - sorry, I'm having one of those mornings. You are very correct. Thank you for being so patient and you're right - it only fetches the first listed, so duplicates aren't a problem per se. I'll hide in a corner!

[matthiask]

Don't worry :-)

Maybe you could report the same issue to the debug toolbar? I'd appreciate that since I'm also maintaining the toolbar together with other people :-) I don't know if it makes sense to show the same file multiple times there.

Also, maybe I could change django-js-asset to not call static() so often.

[jsa34]

I was just using ChatGPT to suggest reasons for why it was slow to render my template, and it said:

The browser only makes one network request per static asset (like editor.js) thanks to how browsers handle module scripts and caching.

However, the repeated references to django_prose_editor/editor.js in Django Debug Toolbar (or logs) refer to how many times Django attaches that file to the HTML via form.media, not how many times the browser downloads it.

🔄 Why You See It Listed So Many Times
Each ProseEditorField (used on dozens of fields in your model) contributes its own:

forms.Media(
js=[JS("django_prose_editor/editor.js", {"type": "module"})],
...
)
Django doesn’t deduplicate these at the HTML/template level. So your final rendered HTML contains 30+ <script type="module" src="/static/django_prose_editor/editor.js"> tags — all pointing to the same URL.

The browser:

Downloads it once (confirmed by your network panel).

Ignores the others (wastes parsing time).

But Django still spends time building those script tags for each field.

So I just looked and assumed the list of static files were all requests, which I guess they are to some level as they inject into the HTML, but not actually requesting the JS/CSS static assets

[matthiask]

Ah yes. Django actually does deduplicate these at the HTML level (in forms.Media). Sometimes the LLMs give very good sounding confident incorrect answers!

[matthiask]

Btw, I've opened a pull request here: django-commons/django-debug-toolbar#2155