Question

So I present a checkbox to the user, as you can see inside my forms.py file:

class AddFooToBarForm(forms.Form):
    to_original = forms.BooleanField(initial=True,
                                     error_messages={'required':
                                                         "Oh no! How do I fix?"})
    ...

Depending on whether the user checks or unchecks that checkbox, I do something different, as you can see inside my views.py file:

def add_foo_to_bar(request, id):
    ...
    try:
        bar = Bar.objects.get(pk=id)

        if request.method == 'POST': # handle submitted data
            form = AddFooToBarForm(bar, request.POST)
            if form.is_valid(): # good, now create Foo and add to bar
                ...
                to_original = form.cleaned_data['to_original']
                print 'to original is {0}'.format(to_original) # for debugging
                if to_original:
                    # do A
                else:
                    # do B

                ...

So I want to test that my site does indeed perform the correct actions, depending on whether the user checks the checkbox or not, inside my tests.py file:

class FooTest(TestCase):
    ...

    def test_submit_add_to_Bar(self):
        form_data = {
            ...
            'to_original': True,
        }
        response = self.client.post(reverse('add_foo_to_bar', args=(self.bar.id,)),
                                    form_data, follow=True)
        self.assertContains(...) # works

        ...

        form_data['to_original'] = None
        response = self.client.post(reverse('add_foo_to_bar', args=(self.bar.id,)),
                                    form_data, follow=True)
        print response # for debugging purposes
        self.assertContains(...) # doesn't work

I’ve tried

• del form_data['to_original'] — this gives me the “Oh no! How do I fix?” error message
• form_data['to_original'] = None — in my view function, I get True, so A is done instead of B
• form_data['to_original'] = False — this gives me the “Oh no! How do I fix?” error message once again

So how should I test the user not checking the checkbox in Django? (I’m using the latest version, 1.4.3)

Answer 1

When checkbox is not checked, its not present in submitted form. Also, when submitted value is 'on'.

If you want to make BooleanField optional have required=False while defining the form field.

Documentation BooleanField.