Getting started

Django test client performs integration tests. All middleware classes, resolvers, decorators and so on are tested. Just a single failure in a middleware can break all the view tests.

One technique of performing the tests was presented at DjangoCon Europe 2013. We, at Sunscrapers have decided to do it in slightly different way, which is why djet has been created.

Testing views

djet makes performing unit tests for your views easier by providing ViewTestCase. Instead of self.client, you can use self.factory, which is an extended RequestFactory with overridden shortcuts for creating requests (eg. path is not required parameter).

Sometimes you would need middleware to be applied in order to test the view. There is an option that helps specify which middleware should be used in a single test or a whole test case by applying middleware_classes argument. This argument should be a list of middleware classes (e.g. SessionMiddleware) or tuples where first argument is middleware class and rest items are middleware types (from MiddlewareType class). In this case only indicated middleware methods will be call.

Assertions

djet also provides additional assertions via mixin classes within djet.assertions module. They have been created to simplify common testing scenarios and currently there is StatusCodeAssertionsMixin, EmailAssertionsMixin, MessagesAssertionsMixin and InstanceAssertionsMixin full of useful assertions.

Remember that if you want to use assertions e.g. from MessagesAssertionsMixin you must also add middleware_classes required by messages to your test case. We do not add them for you in mixin, because we believe those mixin classes shouldn’t implicitly mess with middleware, because it would make it harder to understand what and why exactly is happening in your tests.

Testing file uploads

There are three primary issues, while testing file-related code in Django and djet.files module attempts to solve all of these.

First thing - you won’t need any files put somewhere next to fixtures anymore. create_inmemory_file and create_inmemory_image are ready to use. Those helpful functions are taken from great blog post by Piotr Maliński with just a few small changes.

You can also use InMemoryStorage which deals with files being saved to disk during tests and speed ups tests by keeping them in memory.

InMemoryStorageMixin does another great thing. It replaces DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE with InMemoryStorage for you and also removes all files after test tearDown, so you will no longer see any files crossing between tests. You can also provide any storage you want, it should only implement clear method which is invoked after tearDown. InMemoryStorageMixin cannot be used with bare unittest.TestCase - you have to use TestCase from Django or ViewTestCase from djet.