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 doctest caveats


Doctests have some additional disadvantages that we haven't necessarily run into or noticed yet. Some of these are just things we need to watch out for if we want to make sure our doctests will work properly in a wide variety of environments and as code surrounding our code changes. Others are more serious issues that are most easily solved by switching to unit tests instead of doctests for at least the affected tests. In this section, we will list many of the additional doctest issues to watch out for, and give guidance on what to do to avoid or overcome them.

Beware of environmental dependence

It is very easy for doctests to be unintentionally dependent on implementation details of code other than the code that is actually being tested. We have some of this already in the save override tests, though we have not tripped over it yet. The dependence we have is actually a very specific form of environmental dependence—database dependence. As database dependence is...