Django Views Testing with Scenario
First Blog Post Ever !
Feels weird. Not even sure how to markdown properly but here we are.
I wanted to share a small trick I use quite often when testing views.
Sometimes, your views heavily depends on the logged in user.
Let’s say our tests look like this right now:
from django.test import TestCase
class SimpleTest(TestCase):
@classmethod
def setUpTestData(cls):
# Set up data for the whole TestCase
cls.username = 'johnny'
cls.email = 'test@test.com'
cls.password = 'password'
cls.test_user = User.objects.create_user(cls.username, cls.email, cls.password)
def test_details(self):
self.client.login(username=self.username, password=self.password)
response = self.client.get('/customer/details/')
self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)
def test_index(self):
self.client.login(username=self.username, password=self.password)
response = self.client.get('/customer/index/')
self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)
It can quickly become cumbersome to handle multiple users over and over in your tests and it’s not quite clear what’s “johnny” able to do.
You also might need to force your user to log out, do something, log with another user etc…
What if you need to test the same bit of code with different users with different level of access?
Here’s my solution 
let’s use a context manager.
from contextlib import contextmanager
from django.test import TestCase
from .factories import UserFactory
class ScenarioTestCase(TestCase):
@contextmanager
def log_user(self, user=None):
if user is not None:
self.client.force_login(user)
try:
yield
finally:
if user is not None:
self.client.logout()
@classmethod
def setUpTestData(cls):
cls.user1 = UserFactory.create()
# Add here more users if needed
def setUp(self):
self.no_user_logged_in_scenario = cls.log_user(None)
self.user1_logged_in_scenario = cls.log_user(self.user1)
# Add here any other scenario you'd like
To make things a bit easier, I used a really simple UserFactory using Factory Boy.
Here is the factories.py file if you’re a bit lost:
import factory
from django.conf import settings
from django.contrib.auth.hashers import make_password
class UserFactory(factory.django.DjangoModelFactory):
password = make_password('password')
username = factory.Sequence(lambda n: "User %03d" % n)
email = factory.LazyAttribute(lambda obj: '%s@example.com' % obj.username)
class Meta:
model = settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL
Note that all my test users have a super safe password now.
We have our factory all set and a brand new ScenarioTestCase in our test file ready to go. Let’s try it out !
class SimpleTest(ScenarioTestCase):
def test_access(self):
with self.user1_logged_in_scenario:
self.assertEqual(self.client.get('/customer/details/').status_code, 200)
with self.no_user_logged_in_scenario:
self.assertEqual(self.client.get('/customer/details/').status_code, 403)
# we can also use the contextmanager directly
with self.log_user(self.user1):
...
That’s all folks! Cheers ! 
Update 1: Twidi advised me to use setUpTestData instead of setUp to handle user creation. This allows us to speed up the tests a bit, setUpTestData is only called once for the whole test class. Read More.. 
Update 2: @ewjoachim pointed out in the comments that I was using a wrapper to create scenario (~ like a factory), which was quite pointless here, and that it will be far better with a try/finally for the yield to ensure the user is logged out in all case after the tests. Removing the wrapper around the contextmanager, we’re even able to call it directly now. I renamed create_scenario to log_user, this should be more explicit.
A thousand thanks for your comments and improvements ! Also, this post may be better using pytest… But that will be for another post !