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

Chapter 2. Does This Code Work? Doctests in Depth

In the first chapter, we learned how to run the sample tests created by manage.py startapp. Although we used a Django utility to run the tests, there was nothing specific to Django about the sample tests themselves. In this chapter, we will start getting into details of how to write tests for a Django application. We will:

  • Begin writing the market research project created in the first chapter by developing some basic models that will be used by the project

  • Experiment with adding doctests to one of the models

  • Begin to learn the kinds of tests that are useful, and the kinds that just add clutter to the code

  • Discover some of the advantages and disadvantages of doctests

While the previous chapter mentioned both doctests and unit tests, the focus for this chapter will be on doctests exclusively. Developing unit tests for Django applications will be the focus of Chapter 3, Testing 1, 2, 3: Basic Unit Testing and Chapter 4, Getting Fancier: Django Unit...