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

The Survey application models


A common place to start development of a new Django application is with the models: the basic building blocks of data that are going to be manipulated and stored by the application. A cornerstone model for our example market research survey application will be the Survey model.

A Survey is going to be similar to the Django tutorial Poll model, except that:

  • Where the tutorial Poll only contains one question, a Survey will have multiple questions.

  • A Survey will have a title for reference purposes. For the tutorial Poll, a single question could be used for this.

  • A Survey will only be open for responses for a limited (and variable, depending on the Survey instance) time. While the Poll model has a pub_date field, it is not used for anything other than ordering Polls on the index page. Thus, Survey will need two date fields where Poll has only one, and the Survey date fields will be used more than the Poll pub_date field is used.

Given just these few simple requirements...