Dick Brouwer

Unit testing Django views/classes that require certain session data is possible in Django, but it requires a few tricks to make it work well. Three key issues that often come up:

Session needs to persist across different tests (e.g. in a shopping cart environment) The request object requires certain attributes to be set (e.g. ‘META’) The session object requires additional session parameters to be set.

The following code sample provides a solution to this problem by creating a mock HttpRequest object.

from django.test import TestCase
from django.utils.importlib import import_module
from django.http import HttpRequest
from django.conf import settings

class SampleTest(TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        # Create mock request object with session key
        engine = import_module(settings.SESSION_ENGINE)
        request = HttpRequest()
        request.session = engine.SessionStore()
        request.session['somekey'] = 'somevalue'
        request.session.session_key = 'session_key_from_model_object?'