Django-webtest

When testing my views in a Django application, I always use django-webtest. This is a Django binding for a library from paste, which simply talks to a web application using wsgi, and acts like a browser in a very basic manner.

For example: submitting forms works as expected and sends the data contained in the inputs inside such form, in the method defined in <form method=""> and to the url defined in <form action="">, click()ing links takes you to the url in their href attribute, etc.

These are tests which will actually tell you if your templates are broken. So you are not simply testing your views. You are testing the template html as well. If you forget to add that {÷ csrf_token ÷} to your form, the test will fail. If one of the designers accidentally removes your "edit profile" link, you will know that.

An obviously missing feature is JavaScript support. So, if your app doesn't work without it, you won't be able to use this to the fullest.

Your view testing code with WebTest will look like this:

    def test_delete_object(self):
        object = construct_model_instance_somehow()
        owner = object.owner

        # go to the object's page, logged in as the owner
        details_page = self.app.get(object.get_absolute_url(), user=owner)

        # click delete link
        delete_page = details_page.click('delete')

        form = delete_page.form

        form.submit().follow()

        self.assertFalse(Object.objects.filter(
            some_data='you know').exists())

Every .click() call is an assertion that the page loads with no errors, and returns the response. You can actually chain click calls, even though I don't find it so useful myself. If you want a BeautifulSoup to check that your HTML response contains the correct links, just install BeautifulSoup (3.x for now) in your environment and access response.html to get a soup. Not to mention .showbrowser(), which fires up your browser to show you the HTML directly. A huge time saver for debugging.

In conclusion, very useful stuff. You should use it.