Django Testcase, possible to load fixture at the class/module level?

Question

I'm trying to load a json fixture into a Python 2.6/Django 1.4 unit test. I can do it at the test level, using Django's TestCase, but it takes 8-10 seconds to load (2M of json, not going to get much smaller). Running a dozen tests is therefore really slow, and I'd like to load the test database just once. It looks like it might be possible in Python 2.6, with the addition of unittest2 , but I haven't gotten it to work.

# Works, but takes eight seconds per test.
class BaseStuff(django.test.testcases.TestCase):
    fixtures = ['test_data']

    def setUp(self):
        # stuff
    def test_one(self):
        # stuff

# Doesn't work - but runs *really* fast.
class BaseStuff(unittest2.TestCase):
    @classmethod
    def setUpClass(cls):  # Added in unittest2
        fixtures = ['test_data']
        print "in setupClass()"  # Does print, so function is called.

Trying setupModule() didn't work, either. The setup function is definitely being called, but doesn't seem to be fixture-aware.

So Django's TestCase will read fixtures, and unittest2's TestCase will do things at the class/module level. Is there any way to combine this operation, and read fixtures at the class/module level? I tried multiple inheritance, and couldn't get it to load the data.

Update: Based on @robjohncox's suggestion, this code, at the module level:

from django.core import management
management.call_command('loaddata', 'test_data.json', verbosity=1, noinput=True)

does seem to create a database. But then Django appears to create another database for each test (which is empty). Not sure how to tell the TestCase to use the first db (I tried both the Django and unittest2 TestCase).

Answer 1

You may be able to solve this by loading the fixture data manually yourself inside setUpClass method - there is a django admin command ( loaddata ) which can do this for you which can be called from the code . As you correctly pointed out in your example, this would need to be a unittest2.TestCase .

Answer 2

As Django doc suggests, you can use the name of the DB in the name of the fixture, to load the data in a db:

So combining your suggestion and mine:

In your settings.py, you have this databases:

DATABASES = {'default': ..., 'legacy_db': ...}

Then you can load fixture to a db like this:

from django.core import management
management.call_command('loaddata', 'test_data.legacy_db.json', verbosity=1, noinput=True)

Reference: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#database-specific-fixtures