(Directly) Testing Django Formsets

2016-04-30 @ 18:56:01

here.

Django Forms are excellent: they offer a really nice API for validating user input. You can quite easily pass a dict of data instead of a QueryDict, which is what the request handling mechanism provides. This makes it trivial to write tests that exercise a given Form’s validation directly. For instance:

def test_my_form(self):
    form = MyForm({
        'foo': 'bar',
        'baz': 'qux'
    })
    self.assertFalse(form.is_valid())
    self.assertTrue('foo' in form.errors)

Formsets are also really nice: they expose a neat way to update a group of homogenous objects. It’s possible to pass a list of dicts to the formset for the initial argument, but, alas, you may not do the same for passing data. Instead, it needs to be structured as the QueryDict would be:

def test_my_formset(self):
    formset = MyFormSet({
        'formset-INITIAL_FORMS': '0',
        'formset-TOTAL_FORMS': '2',
        'formset-0-foo': 'bar1',
        'formset-0-baz': 'qux1',
        'formset-1-foo': 'spam',
        'formset-1-baz': 'eggs'
    })
    self.assertTrue(formset.is_valid())

This is fine if you only have a couple of forms in your formset, but it’s a bit tiresome to have to put all of the prefixes, and is far noisier.

Here’s a nice little helper, that takes a FormSet class, and a list (of dicts), and instantiates the formset with the data coerced into the correct format:

def instantiate_formset(formset_class, data, instance=None, initial=None):
    prefix = formset_class().prefix
    formset_data = {}
    for i, form_data in enumerate(data):
        for name, value in form_data.items():
            if isinstance(value, list):
                for j, inner in enumerate(value):
                    formset_data['{}-{}-{}_{}'.format(prefix, i, name, j)] = inner
            else:
                formset_data['{}-{}-{}'.format(prefix, i, name)] = value
    formset_data['{}-TOTAL_FORMS'.format(prefix)] = len(data)
    formset_data['{}-INITIAL_FORMS'.format(prefix)] = 0

    if instance:
        return formset_class(formset_data, instance=instance, initial=initial)
    else:
        return formset_class(formset_data, initial=initial)

This handles a formset or a model formset. Much easier to use:

def test_my_formset(self):
    formset = instantiate_formset(MyFormSet, [
      {
        'foo': 'bar1',
        'baz': 'qux1',
      },
      {
        'foo': 'spam',
        'baz': 'eggs',
      },
    ])