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djangodjango-testing

Django Testing - Hard code URLs or Not

This is a best-practices question.

When writing tests in Django, is it better to hard code urls in your tests.py, or to use the dispatch's reverse() function to retrieve the correct url?

Using hard-coded urls for testing only feels like the right way, but at the same time I can't think of a good enough argument for not using reverse().

Option A. reverse()

# Data has already been loaded through a fixture
def test_view_blog(self):
    url = reverse('blog', kwargs={'blog_slug':'test-blog'})
    response = self.client.get(url)
    self.failUnlessEqual(response.status_code, 200)

Option B. hard-coded

# Data has already been loaded through a fixture
def test_view_blog(self):
    url = '/blog/test-blog/'
    response = self.client.get(url)
    self.failUnlessEqual(response.status_code, 200)
Solution

  • I've recently started using Twill via django-test-utils to unit test some of my Django work.

    Instead of hardcoding URLs and/or using reverse I use things like twill.follow('Blog') (to follow a "Blog" link on the page).

    This lets you really test the behavior of your website, just like a web browser would see it, and can catch things the other methods can't. For example, it would fail if you accidentally removed the "Blog" link from your navigation links.