Django Rest Framework Camel Case - Testing not using parser

Question

I have a simple REST API in Django using rest_framework. I added the djangorestframework-camel-case plugin and updated my REST_FRAMEWORK configuration and the REST API outputs proper camelCase. However, when I test using unittest (python manage.py test app.test), the results are in snake_case instead of camelCase and cause my assertions to fail.

Using this fork: https://github.com/rense/djangorestframework-camel-case

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.permissions.DjangoModelPermissions',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
        'rest_framework.authentication.TokenAuthentication',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_FILTER_BACKENDS': ('rest_framework.filters.DjangoFilterBackend', 'rest_framework.filters.OrderingFilter'),
    'DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES': ('djangorestframework_camel_case.render.CamelCaseJSONRenderer',),
    'DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES': ('djangorestframework_camel_case.parser.CamelCaseJSONParser',),
    'TEST_REQUEST_RENDERER_CLASSES': ('djangorestframework_camel_case.render.CamelCaseJSONRenderer',),
    'TEST_REQUEST_PARSER_CLASSES': ('djangorestframework_camel_case.parser.CamelCaseJSONParser',),
    'TEST_REQUEST_DEFAULT_FORMAT': 'json',
}

Do I need to add some additional configuration? Is this a bug in djangorestframework? In djangorestframework-camel-case?

Answer 1

The problem might be in your test file.

Let's say you have in your tests something among the lines of:

client = APIClient() response = client.get('some_url', format='json')

The response object will have a data parameter which will be snake_case, and a content which will be camelCase.

response.data # will contain snake_case keys json.loads(response.content) # will contain camelCase keys

Make sure you are running your assertions against the right response parameter.

Answer 2

I just learned you can also set this globally, which may be what you want:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    ...
    'TEST_REQUEST_DEFAULT_FORMAT': 'json'
}

as per docs: https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/testing/#configuration