How TDD can be applied to Django Class based Generic Views?

Question

Since Class based Generic Views in Django involve some work by the framework I find very hard to work with them in a TDD style. Now I use the TestClient to access the view from the http mocked stack, but I would prefer to properly unittest specific methods (es. overrides of get_object and get_queryset ) before 'functional' testing with the TestClient.

Is there a ( quick ) way to obtain a proper instance of a ClassView to perform unit test on it?

Answer 1

Generally, that would include creating a request via the RequestFactory and instantiating the view class with keyword arguments. Afterwards, you can call any of the view methods and evaluate the result, passing any required arguments.

I'd recommend that you review the base View class, specifically the __init__, as_view and dispatch methods. They're crucial to understanding how the framework interacts with view objects.

The most important bit to notice there is that view methods expect to be called during a request-response process, so they're allowed to rely upon self.request, self.args and self.kwargs to be present before they're called, so make sure you've got that covered.

Answer 2

Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but this is an example of how I try to unit test my views (untested code below):

import unittest from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse from django.test.client import RequestFactory from ..views import MyClassBasedView  class MyClassBasedViewTestCase(unittest.TestCase):      def setUp(self):         self.factory = RequestFactory()      def test_list_view(self):         request = self.factory.get(reverse('your_url'))         # additional params can go after request         response = MyClassBasedView.as_view()(request)         self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200) 

I'd also recommend looking at the documentation that Filip mentioned in his answer.