Testing Django View Functions

Question

I am currently trying to create unittests for the functions that I have written inside views.py. However, I have not been able to find the proper way to do so. Here is what I have so far for example:

views.py:

class SalesListView(LoginRequiredMixin, TemplateView):
    def get_month(self):
        if self.request.GET.get('month'):
            d = datetime.strptime(self.request.GET.get('month'), '%Y-%m')
        else:
            d = datetime.today()
        return d

and I am attempting to test it like so:

tests.py:

class ViewFunctionsTests(TestCase):
    def test_saleslistview(self):
        self.request = Mock(session={'month': '2019-11'}, method='GET')
        view = SalesListView()
        self.assertEqual(view.get_month(), '2019-11')

However this returns an AttributeError stating: AttributeError: 'SalesListView' object has no attribute 'request'

Would anybody have any suggestions on the correct way to test view functions such as the one above? Thank you ahead of time.

Answer 1

From Django doc:

from django.test import Client
c = Client()
response = c.post('/login/', {'username': 'john', 'password': 'smith'})
response.status_code
200
response = c.get('/customer/details/')
response.content

for more details: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/topics/testing/tools/

Answer 2

I found the solution that I was looking for by using the RequestFactory library.

class ViewFunctionsTests(TestCase):
    def test_saleslistview(self):
        request = RequestFactory().get('/sales/sales_dashboard/?month=2019-11')
        view = SalesListView()
        view.setup(request)
        self.assertEqual(view.get_month(), datetime.datetime(2019, 11, 1, 0, 0))

The request requires the path to your template. Hopefully this helps, should you encounter the same problem that I did.