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

How much of the code are we testing?


When writing tests, the goal is to test everything. Although we can try to be vigilant and manually ensure that we have a test for every line of our code, that's a very hard goal to meet without some automated analysis to verify what lines of code are executed by our tests. For Python code, Ned Batchelder's coverage module is an excellent tool for determining what lines of code are being executed. In this section, we see how to use coverage, first as a standalone utility and then integrated into our Django project.

Using coverage standalone

Before using coverage, it must first be installed, since it's neither included with Python nor Django 1.1. If you are using Linux, your distribution package manager may have coverage available to be installed on your system. Alternatively, the latest version of coverage can always be found at its web page on the Python Package Index (PyPI), http://pypi.python.org/pypi/coverage. The version of coverage used here is 3...