How do I unit test Django Views?

Question

I want to begin integrating unit tests into my Django projects and I've discovered unit testing a view to be tricky because of the way Django implements views with functions.

For example, each function is a view/page in Django if the function has a URL.

How do I unit test Django views?

Answer 1

I'm not sure how testing a view is tricky.

You just use the test client.

Code coverage is easy. You reason how how a URL request maps to a code path and make the appropriate URL requests.

You can, if you want, call the view functions "manually" by creating a Request object and examining the Response object, but this is too much work.

If you have doubts about your code coverage, that's a good thing. It means you have code you can't easily map to a URL (which is all a user can ever see of a web application.) If you have code that doesn't map to a URL, you should probably either (a) delete the code or (b) refactor it into a separate module.

We have lots of modules outside our view functions. Our view functions import these modules. We test these "outside the view function" modules with ordinary unittest.

---

Here's a typical structure.

some_big_product/
|-- __init__.py
|-- settings.py
|-- urls.py
|-- logging.ini
|-- other_global_files.py
|-- an_app_1/
|   |-- __init__.py
|   |-- urls.py
|   |-- models.py
|   |-- views.py
|   |-- tests.py <-- the generic Django testing 
|   |-- app_specific_module.py
|   |-- app_specific_package/
|   |   |-- __init__.py
|   |-- test_app_specific_module.py <-- unittest 
|   |-- test_app_specific_package.py
|-- generic_module.py
|-- generic_package/
|   |-- __init__.py
|-- tests/
|   |-- test_this.py
|   |-- test_that.py
|   |-- test_all.py <-- not always practical
|-- scripts/
    |-- run_tests.sh 

Answer 2

You could try tddspry - collection of helpers to test Django with nosetests and twill. Nose also have coverage plugin which generate pretty reports of the coverage.

Answer 3

django.test.client should have everything you need for basic unit testing of the view. I also really like twill and selenium for testing the full stack.