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More Advanced Forms

Let’s look at some more advanced forms usage. We’ve helped our users to avoid blank list items, so now let’s help them avoid duplicate items.

Our validation constraint so far has been about preventing blank items, and as you may remember, it turned out we can enforce that very easily in the frontend. Avoiding duplicate items is less straightforward to do in the frontend (although not impossible, of course), so this chapter will lean more heavily on server-side validation, and bubbling errors from the backend back up to the UI.

This chapter goes into the more intricate details of Django’s forms framework, so you have my official permission to skip it if you already know all about customising Django forms and how to display errors in the UI, or if you’re reading this book for the TDD rather than for the Django.

If you’re still learning Django, there’s good stuff in here! If you want to skip ahead, that’s OK too. Make sure you take a quick look at the aside on developer stupidity, and the recap on testing views at the end.

Another FT for Duplicate Items

We add a second test method to ItemValidationTest, and tell a little story about what we want to see happen when a user tries to enter the same item twice into their to-do list:

Example 1. src/functional_tests/test_list_item_validation.py (ch15l001)
def test_cannot_add_duplicate_items(self):
    # Edith goes to the home page and starts a new list
    self.browser.get(self.live_server_url)
    self.get_item_input_box().send_keys("Buy wellies")
    self.get_item_input_box().send_keys(Keys.ENTER)
    self.wait_for_row_in_list_table("1: Buy wellies")

    # She accidentally tries to enter a duplicate item
    self.get_item_input_box().send_keys("Buy wellies")
    self.get_item_input_box().send_keys(Keys.ENTER)

    # She sees a helpful error message
    self.wait_for(
        lambda: self.assertEqual(
            self.browser.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, ".invalid-feedback").text,
            "You've already got this in your list",
        )
    )

Why have two test methods rather than extending one, or having a new file and class? It’s a judgement call. These two feel closely related; they’re both about validation on the same input field, so it feels right to keep them in the same file. On the other hand, they’re logically separate enough that it’s practical to keep them in different methods:

$ python src/manage.py test functional_tests.test_list_item_validation
[...]
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: Unable to locate
element: .invalid-feedback; [...]

Ran 2 tests in 9.613s

OK, so we know the first of the two tests passes now. Is there a way to run just the failing one, I hear you ask? Why, yes indeed:

$ python src/manage.py test functional_tests.\
test_list_item_validation.ItemValidationTest.test_cannot_add_duplicate_items
[...]
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: Unable to locate
element: .invalid-feedback; [...]

Preventing Duplicates at the Model Layer

Here’s what we really wanted to do. It’s a new test that checks that duplicate items in the same list raise an error:

Example 2. src/lists/tests/test_models.py (ch15l002)
def test_duplicate_items_are_invalid(self):
    mylist = List.objects.create()
    Item.objects.create(list=mylist, text="bla")
    with self.assertRaises(ValidationError):
        item = Item(list=mylist, text="bla")
        item.full_clean()

And, while it occurs to us, we add another test to make sure we don’t overdo it on our integrity constraints:

Example 3. src/lists/tests/test_models.py (ch15l003)
def test_CAN_save_same_item_to_different_lists(self):
    list1 = List.objects.create()
    list2 = List.objects.create()
    Item.objects.create(list=list1, text="bla")
    item = Item(list=list2, text="bla")
    item.full_clean()  # should not raise

I always like to put a little comment for tests which are checking that a particular use case should 'not' raise an error; otherwise, it can be hard to see what’s being tested:

AssertionError: ValidationError not raised

If we want to get it deliberately wrong, we can do this:

Example 4. src/lists/models.py (ch15l004)
class Item(models.Model):
    text = models.TextField(default="", unique=True)
    list = models.ForeignKey(List, default=None, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

That lets us check that our second test really does pick up on this problem:

ERROR: test_CAN_save_same_item_to_different_lists (lists.tests.test_models.List
AndItemModelsTest.test_CAN_save_same_item_to_different_lists)
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "...goat-book/src/lists/tests/test_models.py", line 59, in
test_CAN_save_same_item_to_different_lists
    item.full_clean()  # should not raise
    [...]
django.core.exceptions.ValidationError: {'text': ['Item with this Text already
exists.']}
[...]
An Aside on When to Test for Developer Silliness

One of the judgement calls in testing is when you should write tests that sound like "check that we haven’t done something weird". In general, you should be wary of these.

In this case, we’ve written a test to check that you can’t save duplicate items to the same list. Now, the simplest way to get that test to pass, the way in which you’d write the fewest lines of code, would be to make it impossible to save 'any' duplicate items. That justifies writing another test, despite the fact that it would be a "silly" or "wrong" thing for us to code.

But you can’t be writing tests for every possible way we could have coded something wrong[1]. If you have a function that adds two numbers, you can write a couple of tests:

assert adder(1, 1) == 2
assert adder(2, 1) == 3

But you have the right to assume that the implementation isn’t deliberately screwy or perverse:

def adder(a, b):
    # unlikely code!
    if a == 3:
        return 666
    else:
        return a + b

One way of putting it is that you should trust yourself not to do something deliberately silly, but not something accidentally silly.

Just like ModelForms, models have a class Meta, and that’s where we can implement a constraint which says that an item must be unique for a particular list, or in other words, that text and list must be unique together:

Example 5. src/lists/models.py (ch15l005)
class Item(models.Model):
    text = models.TextField(default="")
    list = models.ForeignKey(List, default=None, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

    class Meta:
        unique_together = ("list", "text")

You might want to take a quick peek at the Django docs on model Meta attributes at this point.

Rewriting the Old Model Test

That long-winded model test did serendipitously help us find unexpected bugs, but now it’s time to rewrite it. I wrote it in a very verbose style to introduce the Django ORM, but in fact, we can get the same coverage from a couple of much shorter tests. Delete test_saving_and_retrieving_items and replace it with this:

Example 6. src/lists/tests/test_models.py (ch15l006)
class ListAndItemModelsTest(TestCase):
    def test_default_text(self):
        item = Item()
        self.assertEqual(item.text, "")

    def test_item_is_related_to_list(self):
        mylist = List.objects.create()
        item = Item()
        item.list = mylist
        item.save()
        self.assertIn(item, mylist.item_set.all())

    [...]

That’s more than enough really—​a check of the default values of attributes on a freshly initialized model object is enough to sanity-check that we’ve probably set some fields up in 'models.py'. The "item is related to list" test is a real "belt and braces" test to make sure that our foreign key relationship works.

While we’re at it, we can split this file out into tests for Item and tests for List (there’s only one of the latter, test_get_absolute_url):

Example 7. src/lists/tests/test_models.py (ch15l007)
class ItemModelTest(TestCase):
    def test_default_text(self):
        [...]


class ListModelTest(TestCase):
    def test_get_absolute_url(self):
        [...]

That’s neater and tidier:

$ python src/manage.py test lists
[...]
Ran 26 tests in 0.092s

OK

Integrity Errors That Show Up on Save

A final aside before we move on. Do you remember the discussion in mentioned in [chapter_14_database_layer_validation] that some data integrity errors are picked up on save? It all depends on whether the integrity constraint is actually being enforced by the database.

Try running makemigrations and you’ll see that Django wants to add the unique_together constraint to the database itself, rather than just having it as an application-layer constraint:

$ python src/manage.py makemigrations
Migrations for 'lists':
  src/lists/migrations/0005_alter_item_unique_together.py
    ~ Alter unique_together for item (1 constraint(s))

Now let’s run the migration:

$ python src/manage.py migrate

When you run the migration, you may encounter the following error:

$ python src/manage.py migrate
Operations to perform:
  Apply all migrations: auth, contenttypes, lists, sessions
Running migrations:
  Applying lists.0005_alter_item_unique_together...Traceback (most recent call last):
[...]
sqlite3.IntegrityError: UNIQUE constraint failed: lists_item.list_id, lists_item.text

[...]
django.db.utils.IntegrityError: UNIQUE constraint failed: lists_item.list_id, lists_item.text

The problem is that we have at least one database record which used to be valid but after introducing our new constraint, the unique_together, it’s no longer compatible.

To fix this problem, we can just delete src/db.sqlite3 and run the migration again. We can do this because the database on our laptop is only used for dev, so the data in it is not important.

In [chapter_18_second_deploy], we’ll deploy our new code to production, and discuss what to do if we run into migrations and data integrity issues at that point.

Now if we change our duplicates test to do a .save instead of a .full_clean…​

Example 8. src/lists/tests/test_models.py (ch15l008)
    def test_duplicate_items_are_invalid(self):
        mylist = List.objects.create()
        Item.objects.create(list=mylist, text="bla")
        with self.assertRaises(ValidationError):
            item = Item(list=mylist, text="bla")
            # item.full_clean()
            item.save()

It gives:

ERROR: test_duplicate_items_are_invalid
(lists.tests.test_models.ItemModelTest.test_duplicate_items_are_invalid)
[...]
sqlite3.IntegrityError: UNIQUE constraint failed: lists_item.list_id,
lists_item.text
[...]
django.db.utils.IntegrityError: UNIQUE constraint failed: lists_item.list_id,
lists_item.text

You can see that the error bubbles up from SQLite, and it’s a different error from the one we want, an IntegrityError instead of a ValidationError.

Let’s revert our changes to the test, and see them all passing again:

$ python src/manage.py test lists
[...]
Ran 26 tests in 0.092s
OK

And now it’s time to commit our model-layer changes:

$ git status # should show changes to tests + models and new migration
$ git add src/lists
$ git diff --staged
$ git commit -m "Implement duplicate item validation at model layer"

Experimenting with Duplicate Item Validation at the Views Layer

Let’s try running our FT, just to see where we are:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: Unable to locate
element: .invalid-feedback; [...]

In case you didn’t see it as it flew past, the site is 500ing.[2] A quick unit test at the view level ought to clear this up:

Example 9. src/lists/tests/test_views.py (ch15l009)
class ListViewTest(TestCase):
    [...]

    def test_for_invalid_input_shows_error_on_page(self):
        [...]

    def test_duplicate_item_validation_errors_end_up_on_lists_page(self):
        list1 = List.objects.create()
        Item.objects.create(list=list1, text="textey")
        response = self.client.post(
            f"/lists/{list1.id}/",
            data={"text": "textey"},
        )

        expected_error = escape("You've already got this in your list")
        self.assertContains(response, expected_error)
        self.assertTemplateUsed(response, "list.html")
        self.assertEqual(Item.objects.all().count(), 1)

Gives:

django.db.utils.IntegrityError: UNIQUE constraint failed: lists_item.list_id,
lists_item.text

We want to avoid integrity errors! Ideally, we want the call to is_valid to somehow notice the duplication error before we even try to save, but to do that, our form will need to know in advance what list it’s being used for.

Let’s put a skip on that test for now:

Example 10. src/lists/tests/test_views.py (ch15l010)
from unittest import skip
[...]

    @skip
    def test_duplicate_item_validation_errors_end_up_on_lists_page(self):

A More Complex Form to Handle Uniqueness Validation

The form to create a new list only needs to know one thing, the new item text. A form which validates that list items are unique needs to know the list too. Just as we overrode the save method on our ItemForm, this time we’ll override the constructor on our new form class so that it knows what list it applies to.

We duplicate our tests for the previous form, tweaking them slightly:

Example 11. src/lists/tests/test_forms.py (ch15l011)
from lists.forms import (
    DUPLICATE_ITEM_ERROR,
    EMPTY_ITEM_ERROR,
    ExistingListItemForm,
    ItemForm,
)
[...]

class ExistingListItemFormTest(TestCase):
    def test_form_renders_item_text_input(self):
        list_ = List.objects.create()
        form = ExistingListItemForm(for_list=list_)
        self.assertIn('placeholder="Enter a to-do item"', form.as_p())

    def test_form_validation_for_blank_items(self):
        list_ = List.objects.create()
        form = ExistingListItemForm(for_list=list_, data={"text": ""})
        self.assertFalse(form.is_valid())
        self.assertEqual(form.errors["text"], [EMPTY_ITEM_ERROR])

    def test_form_validation_for_duplicate_items(self):
        list_ = List.objects.create()
        Item.objects.create(list=list_, text="no twins!")
        form = ExistingListItemForm(for_list=list_, data={"text": "no twins!"})
        self.assertFalse(form.is_valid())
        self.assertEqual(form.errors["text"], [DUPLICATE_ITEM_ERROR])

Next we iterate through a few TDD cycles until we get a form with a custom constructor, which just ignores its for_list argument. (I won’t show them all, but I’m sure you’ll do them, right? Remember, the Goat sees all.)

Example 12. src/lists/forms.py (ch15l012)
DUPLICATE_ITEM_ERROR = "You've already got this in your list"
[...]
class ExistingListItemForm(forms.models.ModelForm):
    def __init__(self, for_list, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

At this point our error should be:

ValueError: ModelForm has no model class specified.

Then let’s see if making it inherit from our existing form helps:

Example 13. src/lists/forms.py (ch15l013)
class ExistingListItemForm(ItemForm):
    def __init__(self, for_list, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

Yes, that takes us down to just one failure:

FAIL: test_form_validation_for_duplicate_items (lists.tests.test_forms.Existing
ListItemFormTest.test_form_validation_for_duplicate_items)
[...]
    self.assertFalse(form.is_valid())
AssertionError: True is not false

The next step requires a little knowledge of Django’s internals, but you can read up on it in the Django docs on model validation and form validation.

Django uses a method called validate_unique, both on forms and models, and we can use both, in conjunction with the instance attribute:

Example 14. src/lists/forms.py
from django.core.exceptions import ValidationError
[...]

class ExistingListItemForm(ItemForm):

    def __init__(self, for_list, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.instance.list = for_list

    def validate_unique(self):
        try:
            self.instance.validate_unique()
        except ValidationError as e:
            e.error_dict = {"text": [DUPLICATE_ITEM_ERROR]}
            self._update_errors(e)

That’s a bit of Django voodoo right there, but we basically take the validation error, adjust its error message, and then pass it back into the form.

And we’re there! A quick commit:

$ git diff
$ git add src/lists/forms.py src/lists/tests/test_forms.py
$ git commit -m "implement ExistingListItemForm, add DUPLICATE_ITEM_ERROR message"

Using the Existing List Item Form in the List View

Now let’s see if we can put this form to work in our view.

We remove the skip, and while we’re at it, we can use our new constant. Tidy.

Example 15. src/lists/tests/test_views.py (ch15l014)
from lists.forms import (
    DUPLICATE_ITEM_ERROR,
    EMPTY_ITEM_ERROR,
    ExistingListItemForm,
    ItemForm,
)
[...]

    def test_duplicate_item_validation_errors_end_up_on_lists_page(self):
        [...]
        expected_error = escape(DUPLICATE_ITEM_ERROR)

That brings back our integrity error:

django.db.utils.IntegrityError: UNIQUE constraint failed: lists_item.list_id,
lists_item.text

Our fix for this is to switch to using the new form class. Before we implement it, let’s find the tests where we check the form class, and adjust them:

Example 16. src/lists/tests/test_views.py (ch15l015)
class ListViewTest(TestCase):
[...]

    def test_displays_item_form(self):
        mylist = List.objects.create()
        response = self.client.get(f"/lists/{mylist.id}/")
        self.assertIsInstance(response.context["form"], ExistingListItemForm)
        self.assertContains(response, 'name="text"')

    [...]

    def test_for_invalid_input_passes_form_to_template(self):
        response = self.post_invalid_input()
        self.assertIsInstance(response.context["form"], ExistingListItemForm)

That gives us:

AssertionError: <ItemForm bound=False, valid=False, fields=(text)> is not an
instance of <class 'lists.forms.ExistingListItemForm'>

So we can adjust the view:

Example 17. src/lists/views.py (ch15l016)
from lists.forms import ExistingListItemForm, ItemForm
[...]
def view_list(request, list_id):
    our_list = List.objects.get(id=list_id)
    form = ExistingListItemForm(for_list=our_list)
    if request.method == "POST":
        form = ExistingListItemForm(for_list=our_list, data=request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            form.save()
            [...]
    else:
        form = ExistingListItemForm(for_list=our_list)
    [...]

And that 'almost' fixes everything, except for an unexpected fail:

TypeError: ItemForm.save() missing 1 required positional argument: 'for_list'

Our custom save method from the parent ItemForm is no longer needed. Let’s make a quick unit test for that:

Example 18. src/lists/tests/test_forms.py (ch15l017)
class ItemFormTest(TestCase):
[...]
    def test_form_save(self):
        mylist = List.objects.create()
        form = ExistingListItemForm(for_list=mylist, data={"text": "hi"})
        new_item = form.save()
        self.assertEqual(new_item, Item.objects.all()[0])
[...]

We can make our form call the grandparent save method:

Example 19. src/lists/forms.py (ch15l018)
class ExistingListItemForm(ItemForm):
    [...]
    def save(self):
        return forms.models.ModelForm.save(self)
Note
Personal opinion here: I could have used super, but I prefer not to use super when it requires arguments, say, to get a grandparent method. I find Python 3’s super() with no args is awesome to get the immediate parent. Anything else is too error-prone, and I find it ugly besides. YMMV.

Let’s run the tests! All the unit tests pass:

$ python src/manage.py test lists
[...]
Ran 31 tests in 0.082s

OK

But we still have something to do about our FTs:

$ python src/manage.py test functional_tests.test_list_item_validation
[...]
FAIL: test_cannot_add_duplicate_items [...]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
AssertionError: '' != "You've already got this in your list"
+ You've already got this in your list

The error message isn’t being displayed because we are not using the Bootstrap classes. Although it would have been nice to minimise hand-written HTML and use Django instead, it seems like we need to bring back our custom <input> and add a few attributes manually:

Example 20. src/lists/templates/base.html (ch15l019)
@@ -16,10 +16,22 @@
           <h1 class="display-1 mb-4">{% block header_text %}{% endblock %}</h1>

           <form method="POST" action="{% block form_action %}{% endblock %}" >
-            {{ form.text }}
             {% csrf_token %}
+            <input  (1)
+              id="id_text"
+              name="text"
+              class="form-control  (2)
+                     form-control-lg
+                     {% if form.errors %}is-invalid{% endif %}"
+              placeholder="Enter a to-do item"
+              value="{{ form.text.value }}"
+              aria-describedby="id_text_feedback"  (3)
+              required
+            />
             {% if form.errors %}
-              <div class="invalid-feedback">{{ form.errors.text }}</div>
+              <div id="id_text_feedback" class="invalid-feedback">  (3)
+                {{ form.errors.text.0 }}  (4)
+              </div>
             {% endif %}
           </form>
         </div>
  1. We hand-craft the <input> and the most important custom setting will be its class.

  2. As you can see, we can use conditionals even for providing additional class -es.[3]

  3. We add an id to the error message, to be able to use aria-describedby on the input, as recommended in the Bootstrap docs; it makes the error message more accessible to screen readers.

  4. If you just try to use form.errors.text you’ll see that Django injects a <ul> list, because the forms framework can report multiple errors for each field. We know we’ve only got one, so we can use use form.errors.text.0.

Note
Another flip-flop! We spent most of the last chapter switching from handcrafted HTML to having our form autogenerated by Django, and now we’re switching back. It’s a little frustrating, and I could have gone back and changed the book’s text to avoid the back and forth, but I prefer to show software development as it really is. We often try things out and end up changing our minds. Particularly with frameworks like Django, you can find yourself taking advantage of auto-generated shortcuts for as long as they work, but at some points you meet the limits of what the framework designers have anticipated, and it’s time to go back to doing the work yourself. It doesn’t mean you should always reinvent the wheel!

Now let’s run the FT for validation again:

$ python src/manage.py test functional_tests.test_list_item_validation
[...]
======================================================================
FAIL: test_cannot_add_empty_list_items (functional_tests.test_list_item_validat
ion.ItemValidationTest.test_cannot_add_empty_list_items)
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "...goat-book/src/functional_tests/test_list_item_validation.py", line
48, in test_cannot_add_empty_list_items
    self.wait_for_row_in_list_table("2: Make tea")
  File "...goat-book/src/functional_tests/base.py", line 37, in
wait_for_row_in_list_table
    self.assertIn(row_text, [row.text for row in rows])
AssertionError: '2: Make tea' not found in ['1: Make tea', '2: Purchase milk']

Ooops what happened here?

A Little Digression on Queryset Ordering and String Representations

Something seems to be going wrong with the ordering of our list items. Debugging this with an FT is going to be slow, so let’s work at the unit test level.

We’ll add a test that checks that list items are ordered in the order they are inserted. You’ll have to forgive me if I jump straight to the right answer, using intuition borne of long experience, but I suspect that it might be sorting alphabetically based on list text instead (what else would it sort by after all?), so I’ll pick some text values designed to test that hypothesis:

Example 21. src/lists/tests/test_models.py (ch15l020)
class ItemModelTest(TestCase):
    [...]

    def test_list_ordering(self):
        list1 = List.objects.create()
        item1 = Item.objects.create(list=list1, text="i1")
        item2 = Item.objects.create(list=list1, text="item 2")
        item3 = Item.objects.create(list=list1, text="3")
        self.assertEqual(
            Item.objects.all(),
            [item1, item2, item3],
        )
Tip
FTs are a slow feedback loop. Switch to unit tests when you want to drill down on edge case bugs.

That gives us a new failure, but it’s not a very readable one:

AssertionError: <QuerySet [<Item: Item object (1)>, <Item[40 chars]3)>]> !=
[<Item: Item object (1)>, <Item: Item obj[29 chars](3)>]

We need a better string representation for our objects. Let’s add another unit test:

Note
Ordinarily you would be wary of adding more failing tests when you already have some—​it makes reading test output that much more complicated, and just generally makes you nervous. Will we ever get back to a working state? In this case, they’re all quite simple tests, so I’m not worried.
Example 22. src/lists/tests/test_models.py (ch15l021)
def test_string_representation(self):
    item = Item(text="some text")
    self.assertEqual(str(item), "some text")

That gives us:

AssertionError: 'Item object (None)' != 'some text'

As well as the other two failures. Let’s start fixing them all now:

Example 23. src/lists/models.py (ch15l022)
class Item(models.Model):
    [...]

    def __str__(self):
        return self.text

Now we’re down to one failure, and the ordering test has a more readable failure message:

AssertionError: <QuerySet [<Item: i1>, <Item: item 2>, <Item: 3>]> != [<Item:
i1>, <Item: item 2>, <Item: 3>]

That confirms our suspicion that the ordering was alphabetical. We can fix that in the class Meta:

Example 24. src/lists/models.py (ch15l023)
    class Meta:
        ordering = ("id",)
        unique_together = ("list", "text")

Does that work?

AssertionError: <QuerySet [<Item: i1>, <Item: item 2>, <Item: 3>]> != [<Item:
i1>, <Item: item 2>, <Item: 3>]

Urp? It has worked; you can see the items 'are' in the same order, but the tests are confused. I keep running into this problem actually—​Django querysets don’t compare well with lists. We can fix it by converting the queryset to a list[4] in our test:

Example 25. src/lists/tests/test_models.py (ch15l024)
    self.assertEqual(
        list(Item.objects.all()),
        [item1, item2, item3],
    )

That works; we get a fully passing unit test suite:

Ran 33 tests in 0.034s

OK

We do need a migration for that ordering change though:

$ python src/manage.py makemigrations
Migrations for 'lists':
  src/lists/migrations/0006_alter_item_options.py
    ~ Change Meta options on item

And as a final check, we rerun 'all' the FTs:

$ python src/manage.py test functional_tests
[...]
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 5 tests in 19.048s

OK

Hooray! Time for a final commit, and a wrap-up of what we’ve learned about testing views over the last few chapters.

git add src
git commit -m "Fix list item ordering, go back to html5 in FT"

Wrapping Up: What We’ve Learned About Testing Django

We’re now at a point where our app looks a lot more like a "standard" Django app, and it implements the three common Django layers: models, forms, and views. We no longer have any "training wheels”-style tests, and our code looks pretty much like code we’d be happy to see in a real app.

We have one unit test file for each of our key source code files. Here’s a recap of the biggest (and highest-level) one, 'test_views' (the listing shows just the key tests and assertions, and your order may vary):

Wrap-up: What to Test in Views

By way of a recap, let’s see an outline of all the test methods and main assertions in our test_views. This isn’t to say you should copy-paste these exactly, more like a list of things you should at least consider testing.

Example 26. src/lists/tests/test_views.py
class ListViewTest(TestCase):
  def test_uses_list_template(self):
      response = self.client.get(f'/lists/{mylist.id}/') #(1)
      self.assertTemplateUsed(response, 'list.html') #(2)
  def test_passes_correct_list_to_template(self):
      self.assertEqual(response.context['list'], correct_list) #(3)
  def test_displays_item_form(self):
      self.assertIsInstance(response.context['form'], ExistingListItemForm) #(4)
      self.assertContains(response, 'name="text"')
  def test_displays_only_items_for_that_list(self):
      self.assertContains(response, 'itemey 1') #(5)
      self.assertContains(response, 'itemey 2') #(5)
      self.assertNotContains(response, 'other list item 1') #(5)
  def test_can_save_a_POST_request_to_an_existing_list(self):
      self.assertEqual(Item.objects.count(), 1) #(6)
      self.assertEqual(new_item.text, 'A new item for an existing list') #(6)
  def test_POST_redirects_to_list_view(self):
      self.assertRedirects(response, f'/lists/{correct_list.id}/') #(6)
  def test_for_invalid_input_nothing_saved_to_db(self):
      self.assertEqual(Item.objects.count(), 0) #(6)
  def test_for_invalid_input_renders_list_template(self):
      self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)
      self.assertTemplateUsed(response, 'list.html') #(6)
  def test_for_invalid_input_passes_form_to_template(self):
      self.assertIsInstance(response.context['form'], ExistingListItemForm) #(7)
  def test_for_invalid_input_shows_error_on_page(self):
      self.assertContains(response, escape(EMPTY_ITEM_ERROR)) #(7)
  def test_duplicate_item_validation_errors_end_up_on_lists_page(self):
      self.assertContains(response, expected_error) #(7)
      self.assertTemplateUsed(response, 'list.html')
      self.assertEqual(Item.objects.all().count(), 1)
  1. Use the Django Test Client.

  2. Check the template used.

  3. Check that the received objects are the right ones.

  4. Check that any forms are of the correct class.

  5. Think about testing template logic: any for or if might deserve a minimal test.

  6. For POST requests, make sure you test both the valid case and the invalid case.

  7. Optionally, sanity-check that your form is rendered, and its errors are displayed.

Why these points? Skip ahead to [appendix_Django_Class-Based_Views], and I’ll show how they are sufficient to ensure that our views are still correct if we refactor them to start using class-based views.

Next we’ll try to make our data validation more friendly by using a bit of client-side code. Uh-oh, you know what that means…​


1. With that said, you can come pretty close. Once you get comfortable writing tests manually, take a look at Hypothesis. It lets you automatically generate input for your tests, covering many more test scenarios than you could realistically type manually. It’s not always easy to see how to use it, but for the right kind of problem, it can be very powerful; the very first time I used it, it found a bug!
2. It’s showing a server error, code 500. Gotta get with the jargon!
3. We’ve split the input tag across multiple lines so it fits nicely on the screen. If you’ve not seen that before, it may look a little weird to you, but I promise it is valid HTML. You don’t have to use it if you don’t like it though.
4. You could also check out assertSequenceEqual from unittest, and assertQuerysetEqual from Django’s test tools, although I confess when I last looked at assertQuerysetEqual I was quite baffled…​