Show Data

When a node won't tell you what it's doing, make it

Show Data (ETShowDataNode) is the Info Utils pack's debugger. It accepts any input - the input socket is a wildcard that takes strings, ints, lists, tensors, whatever - renders it to text, and displays that text in a box on the node. That's it. No outputs, because it's a terminal node: it exists to look at data, not to route it.

The scenario that makes you reach for it: something in your graph is producing an unexpected result and you don't know what's flowing through. Maybe a Dynamic Prompts node is spitting out prompts you didn't expect, maybe a tagger is returning something weird, maybe a custom node's output isn't what its name implies. Drop Show Data on that output, run, and read what's actually there.

How it works

The node has one real input (input, any type) plus a data widget where the text appears. On each run the backend renders the value and the pack's tiny frontend extension pushes it into the widget, overwriting whatever was there before - so don't bother typing into data, it's a readout, not an input.

The rendering is deliberately honest:

• A single value becomes str(value) - so an image tensor shows up as its array representation, not a picture. If you want to see an image, use the pack's Present Image node instead.
• A list becomes a readable block:

List:
- item one
- item two

• An empty list renders as an empty string.

That last formatting detail matters when you're debugging list-based pipelines: you can instantly tell whether a node handed you a single string or a list, and how long the list is. It's the difference between "the node works" and "the node works, but only on single items."

A note on why this is the safe version of inspect-any

ComfyUI's community has a genuine argument about "anything anywhere" nodes that let you connect any output to any input regardless of type - they're convenient, but they make graphs impossible to debug and understand (a well-known r/comfyui thread literally argues for stopping their use). Show Data is the opposite: it will happily receive anything, but it can't hand garbage onward. It just shows you. That makes it a debugging tool rather than a footgun.

How to install it

Ships in Info Utils (exectails/comfyui-et_infoutils) - no dependencies, no model files. Install via ComfyUI Manager (search "Info Utils") or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/exectails/comfyui-et_infoutils

Restart ComfyUI, then find Show Data under exectails/Info.

The one caveat

The widget updates via the pack's frontend extension, so if the box stays empty while the run completes, your install is missing the JS piece (reinstall/restart - don't copy just the nodes/ folder). And remember it has no outputs, so it can't sit inline in a workflow; for a passthrough version that does let data keep flowing, that's Inspect Text's job.