I have working through some date mocking issues in Django, and have the final hurdle (I hope) is the following situation. I have a FakeDate class, which derives from datetime.date
, which it mocks out.
The FakeDate class works as expected, however I get a problem when adding a datetime.timedelta
to the FakeDate, in that it returns a genuine datetime.date
, rather than the mock. This is important as elsewhere in a third party library there is an isinstance(value, datetime.date)
check, which will always fail when using timedelta.
>>> import mock
>>> import datetime
>>>
>>> class FakeDate(datetime.date):
... @classmethod
... def today(cls):
... return cls(1999, 12, 31)
...
>>> FakeDate.today()
FakeDate(1999, 12, 31)
>>> FakeDate(2000, 1, 1)
FakeDate(2000, 1, 1)
>>> FakeDate(1999, 12, 31) + datetime.timedelta(days=1)
datetime.date(2000, 1, 1)
I want the FakeDate + timedelta addition to return a FakeDate object rather than a datetime.date object - which I imagine involves patching the timedelta somehow - but how / where can I do this?
Add a __add__
method to your FakeDate()
class:
class FakeDate(datetime.date):
@classmethod
def today(cls):
return cls(1999, 12, 31)
def __add__(self, other):
res = super(FakeDate, self).__add__(other)
return type(self)(res.year, res.month, res.day)
Demo:
>>> class FakeDate(datetime.date):
... @classmethod
... def today(cls):
... return cls(1999, 12, 31)
... def __add__(self, other):
... res = super(FakeDate, self).__add__(other)
... return type(self)(res.year, res.month, res.day)
...
>>> FakeDate.today() + datetime.timedelta(days=1)
FakeDate(2000, 1, 1)
Note that you can simply delegate the actual adding to the datetime.date
class here; all we need to do is convert the result back to a FakeDate()
instance.
You just need to define an __add__
method in your FakeDate
class -- it's the method that controls the behavior of the +
operator.
import datetime
class FakeDate(datetime.date):
@classmethod
def today(cls):
return cls(1999, 12, 31)
def __add__(self, delta):
# Create a datetime.date object so we don't need to do any calculations
new_date = super(FakeDate, self).__add__(delta)
# Then convert it to FakeDate.
return FakeDate(new_date.year, new_date.month, new_date.day)
# Returns a FakeDate for 2000-01-01
FakeDate.today() + datetime.timedelta(days=1)
Note that this only handles the fakedate + timedelta
case. If you want timedelta + fakedate
to also return an instance of FakeDate
, you'll need to define the __radd__
method as well (same code as __add__
).
For more information on the __magic_methods__
associated with operators, see http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#emulating-numeric-types .