How can I unit test django messages?

Question

In my django application, I'm trying to write a unit test that performs an action and then checks the messages in the response.

As far as I can tell, there is no nice way of doing this.

I'm using the CookieStorage storage method, and I'd like to do something similar to the following:

    response = self.client.post('/do-something/', follow=True)     self.assertEquals(response.context['messages'][0], "fail.") 

The problem is, all I get back is a

print response.context['messages'] <django.contrib.messages.storage.cookie.CookieStorage object at 0x3c55250> 

How can I turn this into something useful, or am I doing it all wrong?

Thanks, Daniel

Answer 1

I found a really easy approach:

response = self.client.post('/foo/') messages = list(response.context['messages']) self.assertEqual(len(messages), 1) self.assertEqual(str(messages[0]), 'my message') 

If you need to check for messages on a response that has no context you can use the following:

from django.contrib.messages import get_messages messages = list(get_messages(response.wsgi_request)) self.assertEqual(len(messages), 1) self.assertEqual(str(messages[0]), 'my message') 

The fallback storage doesn't support indexing, however it is an iterable.

Answer 2

From django documentation:

Outside of templates, you can use get_messages()

So, you could write something like:

from django.contrib.messages import get_messages  [...]  messages = [m.message for m in get_messages(response.wsgi_request)] self.assertIn('My message', messages) 

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