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


Our exploration of doctests for Django applications is now complete. In this chapter, we:

  • Began to develop some models for our Django survey application

  • Experimented with adding doctests to one of these models—the Survey model

  • Learned what sorts of doctests are useful and which simply add clutter to the code

  • Experienced some of the advantages of doctests, namely the easy re-use of Python shell session work and convenient use of doctests as documentation

  • Ran afoul of many of the disadvantages of doctests, and learned how to avoid or overcome them

In the next chapter, we will begin to explore unit tests. While unit tests may not offer some of the easy re-use features of doctests, they also do not suffer from many of the disadvantages of doctests. Furthermore, the overall unit test framework allows Django to provide convenient support specifically useful for web applications, which will be covered in detail in Chapter 4.