Question

In my views.py I have a piece of code that checks if a model inherits from an other model.

 def inherits_from_animal(some_animal):
     return Animal in inspect.getmro(some_animal)

Now in my views.py this works but in my tests it’s failing because the name of the project gets added to the class name.

So if I have a project named zoo and an app named animals it looks like:

views.py:

<class 'animals.models.Animal'>

tests.py:

<class 'zoo.animals.models.Animal'>

Could anybody explain why this is happening and how I could fix it?

Update:
Seems to only be happening to an abstract model.

Answer 1

The problem is manage.py. If you put django apps inside other packages you should use their fully qualified module name for imports and as a corrolary in INSTALLED_APPS.

It still works if you omit the parent package name, because manage.py temporarily hacks sys.path to import the module that contains the settings module. Then nose does its own import magic and is unable to reproduce the manage.py hack.

I’d recommend to use django-admin.py instead of manage.py as it does not do any import tricks.
There is no concept of a project in django. Just treat everything as plain python packages and control your PYTHONPATH.