Question

I’ve started writing some tests for my Django app and I’m unsure how best to structure the code.

Say I have a register page and a page for logged in users only.
My first plan was to have an earlier method perform the register and a later method use that login to test the page:

def test_register_page(self):
    //send request to register page and check user has been registered correctly
def test_restricted_page(self):
    c = Client();
    c.login("someUser","pass");
    c.post("/someRestrictedPage/");
    //Test response

However this means that now one of my tests rely on the other.
The alternatives I see are calling register in setUp() but this still means that the restricted page test relies on the register page working.

I could try creating a new user manually in setup which I also don’t like because this isn’t testing a user created by the system.

What is the usual pattern for testing this kind of situation?

Answer 1

You are trying to mix together a lot of different functionalities in one test case. A clean design would be having one test case

• for user registration and
• one for the view.

Having them depend on each other will introduce a lot of dependencies between them – and – if the test fails the error will be even harder to debug. The success of the registration test should be determined through the correct creation of the user instance (so check necessary attributes etc of the user) and not through being able to login on a certain page. Therefore you will need to set up a “correct” user instance for the view test case. This may seem a bit more complicated than necessary, but it will make future maintainance a lot easier.
What you are trying to do is more something like an integration test, which tests a whole system, but before that you should split up your system in functional units and do unit tests on this units!
The smaller and well-defined the single tests are, the easier will be their maintainance and debugging.