How TDD can be applied to Django Class based Generic Views?

Question

Since Class based Generic Views in Django involve some work by the framework I find very hard to work with them in a TDD style. Now I use the TestClient to access the view from

Answer 1

I was looking for a simple solution for the same issue today and found this really great blog-post by Benoît Bryon (thanks!).

He suggested the following function:

def setup_view(view, request, *args, **kwargs):
    """Mimic as_view() returned callable, but returns view instance.

    args and kwargs are the same you would pass to ``reverse()``

    """
    view.request = request
    view.args = args
    view.kwargs = kwargs
    return view

Example

I wanted to test the following CBV:

class CreateList(CreateView):
    model = Item
    form_class = NewListForm
    template_name = 'lists/home_page.html'

    def form_valid(self, form):
        list_ = form.save(owner=self.request.user)
        return redirect(list_)

The necessary tests are for the form.save method arguments and for the redirect arguments, which should be the return value of the former. These tests will look something like:

    class CreateListTest(unittest.TestCase):

        def setUp(self):
            self.request = HttpRequest()
            self.request.user = Mock()
            self.form = Mock()
            self.view = setup_view(views.CreateList(), self.request)

        def test_form_dot_save_called_with_user(self):
            self.view.form_valid(self.form)
            self.form.save.assert_called_once_with(owner=self.request.user)

        @patch('lists.views.redirect')
        def test_redirect(self, mock_redirect):
            self.view.form_valid(self.form)
            mock_redirect.assert_called_once_with(self.form.save.return_value)