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

Summary


This brings us to the end of discussing the use of debuggers when developing Django application code. In this chapter, we:

  • Implemented the display of survey results using pygooglechart to create pie charts. When we ran into some trouble along the way, we saw how the Python debugger, pdb, could be used to help figure out what was going wrong. We experimented with many of the most useful pdb commands. We learned the commands used to see the context of the code that is running, examine and change the values of variables, and flexibly control the execution of the code as it proceeds in the debugger.

  • Re-implemented the display of survey results using the matplotlib library. For this alternative implementation, we ended up needing to write code that was vulnerable to multi-process race conditions. Here we saw how pdb can be used to help verify correct behavior of this type of code, since it allows us to force problematic race conditions to occur, and then verify that the code behaves properly...