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

The Django Debug Toolbar


Rob Hudson's Django Debug Toolbar is a very useful general purpose debugging tool for Django applications. As with the code we developed earlier in this chapter, it lets you see the SQL queries that were needed to produce a page. However, as we will see, it also goes far beyond that, providing easy access to much more information about the SQL queries and other aspects of request processing. Furthermore, the debug toolbar has a far more advanced way of displaying the information than simply embedding it in HTML comments. The capabilities are best shown by example, so we will immediately proceed with installing the toolbar.

Installing the Django Debug Toolbar

The toolbar can be found on the Python package index site: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-debug-toolbar. Once installed, activating the debug toolbar in a Django project is accomplished with the addition of just a couple of settings.

First, the debug toolbar middleware, debug_toolbar.middleware.DebugToolbarMiddleware...