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

Testing the Survey model


If you are at all like me, at this point you might want to start verifying that what you've got so far is correct. True, there is not much code yet, but particularly when just starting out on a project I like to make sure, early and often, that what I've got so far is valid. So, how do we start testing at this point? First, we can verify that we've got no syntax errors by running manage.py syncdb, which will also let us start experimenting with these models in a Python shell. Let's do that. Since this is the first time we've run syncdb for this project, we'll get messages about creating tables for the other applications listed in INSTALLED_APPS, and we'll be asked if we want to create a superuser, which we may as well go ahead and do also.

Testing Survey model creation

Now, what might we do with these models to test them in a Python shell? Really, not much beyond creating each, perhaps verifying that if we don't specify one of the fields we get an error, or the correct...