Book Image

Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging

Book Image

Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging

Overview of this book

Bugs are a time consuming burden during software development. Django's built-in test framework and debugging support help lessen this burden. This book will teach you quick and efficient techniques for using Django and Python tools to eradicate bugs and ensure your Django application works correctly. This book will walk you step by step through development of a complete sample Django application. You will learn how best to test and debug models, views, URL configuration, templates, and template tags. This book will help you integrate with and make use of the rich external environment of test and debugging tools for Python and Django applications. The book starts with a basic overview of testing. It will highlight areas to look out for while testing. You will learn about different kinds of tests available, and the pros and cons of each, and also details of test extensions provided by Django that simplify the task of testing Django applications. You will see an illustration of how external tools that provide even more sophisticated testing features can be integrated into Django's framework. On the debugging front, the book illustrates how to interpret the extensive debugging information provided by Django's debug error pages, and how to utilize logging and other external tools to learn what code is doing.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Additional test support


The tests that we have developed in this chapter provide a reasonably broad overview of how to use the test support provided by Django's TestCase and test Client class. However, the examples neither cover every detail of what these classes provide, nor every detail of the additional data available in the annotated response objects returned by the Client. In this section, we briefly mention some additional features of TestCase, Client, and the additional data available with response objects. We will not develop examples that use all of these features; they are mentioned here so that if you encounter a need for this type of support, you will know that it exists. The Django documentation provides full details on all of these topics.

Supporting additional HTTP methods

Our example tests only needed to use the HTTP GET and POST methods. The test Client class also provides methods to issue HTTP HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, and DELETE requests. These methods are named head, options...