Ignore DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE for the Django Admin Site?

Question

What would be the best way to go about forcing all HttpResponse objects returned by views in the Django admin site app to use "text/html" as their content type, regardless of the value of the DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE setting? My project has this set to "application/xhtml+xml," and although content produced by the admin app claims to be valid XHTML (look at its doctype declaration), it is not. Ticket #5704 is a major problem, and I discovered some issues with inline forms (namely a liberal use of  , which is not a named entity in XHTML). A comment in Ticket #11684 indicates that it may be a while before the admin site will fully support XHTML, so I need to figure out how to use "text/html" for the admin site, while leaving the default as "application/xhtml+xml."

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it or not, but I finally achieved my goal by subclassing AdminSite and overriding the admin_view method:

class HTMLAdminSite(admin.AdminSite):
    '''Django AdminSite that forces response content-types to be text/html

    This class overrides the default Django AdminSite `admin_view` method. It
    decorates the view function passed and sets the "Content-Type" header of
    the response to 'text/html; charset=utf-8'.
    '''

    def _force_html(self, view):
        def force_html(*arguments, **keywords):
            response = view(*arguments, **keywords)
            response['Content-Type'] = 'text/html; charset=utf-8'
            return response
        return force_html

    def admin_view(self, view, *arguments, **keywords):
        return super(HTMLAdminSite, self).admin_view(self._force_html(view),
                                                     *arguments, **keywords)

Then, in my root URLconf, before calling admin.autodiscover(), I set admin.site to an instance of this HTMLAdminSite class. It seems to work okay, but if there's a better way, I'd be glad to hear it.