Writing Tests

Any assert statement will take the optional kwarg of ‘msg’. This kwarg will be output instead of an error in the test. It is a very useful argument for debugging.

self.assertTrue(False, msg="And what else floats? A duck!")

Forms

Here are a few pointers for testing forms.

If there is an error in the test for form.is_valid() a good way to find out what form fields are giving trouble is by checking form.errors.

form = MyFormWithErrors()
self.assertTrue(form.is_valid(), msg=form.errors)

All Django forms generally accept ‘initial’, ‘instance’, and ‘data’ keyword arguments, but forms will behave differently depending on which of these arguments you pass in.

data

This is probably the easiest of all the form tests to work with, because it is what you are so used to seeing.

# data is a dictionary
form = MyForm(data)
self.assertTrue(form.is_bound)
self.assertTrue(form.is_valid())
for field in form.fields:
    self.assertEqual(data[field], form.cleaned_data[field])

initial

Initial is a unique case in which I have not found an easy way to check if the initial values of the form were properly set. Checking against form.fields[field].initial will not work as this is set to the value of the initial keyword argument originally passed into the form field.

# initial is a dictionary
form = MyForm(initial=initial)
self.assertFalse(form.is_bound)
self.assertFalse(form.is_valid())
for field in form.fields:
    self.assertEqual(initial[field], form.fields[field].initial) # This will *NOT* work!

instance

Forms that are passed the instance keyword argument will have set the ‘instance’ property on form. Thus you can test form.instance against the instance you passed in.

# instance is an instance of a model
form = MyModelForm(instance=instance)
self.assertEqual(instance, form.instance)

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