APIs provide value to our users by letting them automate their interactions with our service. Naturally, DRF helps us automate testing our code as well.
DRF provides replacements for all the common Django tools we discussed in Chapter 8, Testing Answerly:
APIRequestFactoryfor Django'sRequestFactoryclassAPIClientfor Django'sClientclassAPITestCasefor Django'sTestCaseclass
APIRequestFactory and APIClient make it easier to send requests formatted for our API. For example, they provide an easy way to set credentials for a request that isn't relying on session-based authentication. Otherwise, the two classes serve the same purpose as their default Django equivalents.
TheAPITestCase class simply extends Django's TestCase class and replaces Django's Client with APIClient.
Let's take a look at an example that we can add to django/mailinglist/tests.py:
class ListMailingListsWithAPITestCase(APITestCase):
def setUp(self):
password = 'password'
username = 'unit...