Question

I want to add a custom assert method to a TestCase subclass. I tried to copy my implementation from the unittest module so that it would match the behaviour of the regular TestCase as closely as possible. (I would prefer to just delegate to self.assertEqual() but this causes even more backtrace noise, see below.) The unittest module seems to automatically hide some internal details of its implementation when reporting failed assertions.

import unittest

class MyTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    def assertLengthIsOne(self, sequence, msg=None):
        if len(sequence) != 1:
            msg = self._formatMessage(msg, "length is not one")
            raise self.failureException(msg)

class TestFoo(MyTestCase):
    seq = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

    def test_stock_unittest_assertion(self):
        self.assertEqual(len(self.seq), 1)

    def test_custom_assertion(self):
        self.assertLengthIsOne(self.seq)


unittest.main()

The output of this is as such:

amoe@vuurvlieg $ python unittest-demo.py
FF
======================================================================
FAIL: test_custom_assertion (__main__.TestFoo)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "unittest-demo.py", line 16, in test_custom_assertion
    self.assertLengthIsOne(self.seq)
  File "unittest-demo.py", line 7, in assertLengthIsOne
    raise self.failureException(msg)
AssertionError: length is not one

======================================================================
FAIL: test_stock_unittest_assertion (__main__.TestFoo)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "unittest-demo.py", line 13, in test_stock_unittest_assertion
    self.assertEqual(len(self.seq), 1)
AssertionError: 5 != 1

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 2 tests in 0.000s

FAILED (failures=2)

Note that the custom assert method causes a stack trace with two frames, one inside the method itself, whereas the stock unittest method only has one frame, the relevant line in the user’s code. How can I apply this frame-hiding behaviour to my own method?

Answer 1

This question was answered by Peter Otten on comp.lang.python.

Move MyTestCase in a separate module and define a global variable __unittest = True.

$ cat mytestcase.py 
import unittest

__unittest = True

class MyTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    def assertLengthIsOne(self, sequence, msg=None):
        if len(sequence) != 1:
            msg = self._formatMessage(msg, "length is not one")
            raise self.failureException(msg)

$ cat mytestcase_demo.py 
import unittest
from mytestcase import MyTestCase

class TestFoo(MyTestCase):
    seq = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

    def test_stock_unittest_assertion(self):
        self.assertEqual(len(self.seq), 1)

    def test_custom_assertion(self):
        self.assertLengthIsOne(self.seq)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    unittest.main()

$ python mytestcase_demo.py 
FF
======================================================================
FAIL: test_custom_assertion (__main__.TestFoo)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "mytestcase_demo.py", line 11, in test_custom_assertion
    self.assertLengthIsOne(self.seq)
AssertionError: length is not one

======================================================================
FAIL: test_stock_unittest_assertion (__main__.TestFoo)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "mytestcase_demo.py", line 8, in test_stock_unittest_assertion
    self.assertEqual(len(self.seq), 1)
AssertionError: 5 != 1

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 2 tests in 0.000s

FAILED (failures=2)
$