Test Client

Note: To avoid hard-coding the URL, use reverse, URL.

AJAX and Post

See sample below.

To pass raw data (rather than form fields) to a post request:

post_data = '[{"name": "East Anstey"}, {"name": "East Buckland"}]'
response = self.client.post(
    '/my_screen_name/json/',
    post_data,
    content_type='application/json'
)

To make this into an AJAX request which will be recognised by is_ajax, add the HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH parameter:

response = self.client.post(
    '/my_screen_name/json/',
    post_data,
    content_type='application/json',
    HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH='XMLHttpRequest'
)

Tip

I don’t think content_type is required for AJAX views.

For details see Testing AJAX Views in Django

File Upload

I guess this will also work with image upload:

with open('test/data/about.jpg', 'rb') as fp:
    data = {
        'picture': fp,
    }
    response = self.client.post(
        url,
        data=data,
    )

Sample

Create a tests.py file inside your application folder:

from django.test import TestCase

class SimpleTest(TestCase):
    def test_preview(self):
        response = self.client.post('/wiki/preview/', {
            'data': 'Heading\n=======',
            })
        self.assertTrue('<h1>Heading</h1>' in response.content)

Note:

To avoid hard-coding the URL, use reverse, URL
This code is using the Django test client which can be used to test views.
Don’t forget to put the leading slash on the URL.

Form fields are passed in as simple key/values in the dictionary. Debug the code at the point where the post is made to get some sample data e.g. for a formset:

self.client.post('/admin/product/option/1/', {
    'form-INITIAL_FORMS': '2',
    'form-TOTAL_FORMS': '2',
    'form-0-group_name': 'Colour finishes',
    'form-0-name': 'Orange',
    'form-0-option_id': '6',
    'form-0-price': '23',
    'form-0-price_before': '3',
    'form-1-group_name': 'Colour finishes',
    'form-1-name': 'Green',
    'form-1-option_id': '5',
    'form-1-price': '25',
    'form-1-price_before': '0',
    })

Assertions

Assertions:

`assertContains`

Asserts that a Response instance produced the given status_code and that text appears in the content of the response. If count is provided, text must occur exactly count times in the response:

TestCase.assertContains(response, text, count=None, status_code=200)

e.g:

response = self.client.get('/')
self.assertContains(response, 'Latest News')

Note:

There is also a assertNotContains method.
The response object must be the first parameter to the assertContains method…

`assertRedirects`

response = self.client.get('/region/store/')
self.assertRedirects(response, '/region/choose/')

Tip

If fetch_redirect_response is set to False, the final page won’t be loaded.

If you would to test a re-direct to an external URL (from Django’s assertRedirects little gotcha):

response = self.client.get('/region/store/')
self.assertEqual(
    response._headers['location'],
    ('Location', 'http://orange.net/usa'))
self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 302)

Authentication

To test login and authentication, see Testing.

Cookies

response = self.client.get('/region/store/eu/')
self.assertTrue('region' in response.cookies)
self.assertEquals('eu', response.cookies['region'].value)

Request

From RequestFactory:

from django.utils import unittest
from django.test.client import RequestFactory

class SimpleTest(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        # Every test needs access to the request factory.
        self.factory = RequestFactory()

    def test_details(self):
        # Create an instance of a GET request.
        request = self.factory.get('/customer/details')

        # Test my_view() as if it were deployed at /customer/details
        response = my_view(request)
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)

Response

The response object in the example above has a context attribute which you can use to examine the context returned from the view function. To access context elements, use the following syntax:

response.context['category']

Note: If you examine the context object, you will find it is a list (or a list of lists). This can become very confusing, so just use the simple syntax above to access dictionary elements. For more information see Test client improvements.

URL

To use a test/temporary URL, put a urls.py file into the tests folder, and reference it within the test:

class TestMyView(TestCase):
    urls = 'myapp.tests.urls'

For details, see TestCase.urls