custom python IDEA debugger type renderer that requires an import

Question

I am trying to add a custom type renderer in the IDEA Python debugger. Specifically, I would like to render an xml Element from the standard xml package as a string, eg <xa=1><y>2</y></x>

The code to do so is ElementTree.tostring(self) where self represents the variable or watch in the debugger.

ElementTree needs to be imported so I have unsuccessful tried:

xml.etree.ElementTree.tostring(self)

and

from xml.etree import ElementTree
ElementTree.tostring(self)

In both cases I got an error Unable to evaluate: name 'xml' is not defined in the debugger watch window. See screenshot:

The docs don't mention such cases where importing of the rendering function is required.

Has anyone been able to do so?

Answer 1

After further investigation, I managed to get it working with a dynamic import:

__import__('xml').etree.ElementTree.tostring(self)