Django Testing - check messages for a view that redirects

Question

I have been writing tests for one of my django applications and have been looking to get around this problem for quite some time now. I have a view that sends messages using django.contrib.messages for different cases. The view looks something like the following.

from django.contrib import messages
from django.shortcuts import redirect

import custom_messages

def some_view(request):
    """ This is a sample view for testing purposes.
    """

    some_condition = models.SomeModel.objects.get_or_none(
        condition=some_condition)
    if some_condition:
        messages.success(request, custom_message.SUCCESS)
    else:
        messages.error(request, custom_message.ERROR)
    redirect(some_other_view)

Now, while testing this view client.get's response does not contain the context dictionary that contains the messages as this view uses a redirect. For views that render templates we can get access to the messages list using messages = response.context.get('messages'). How can we get access messages for a view that redirects?

Answer 1

Use the follow=True option in the client.get() call, and the client will follow the redirect. You can then test that the message is in the context of the view you redirected to.

def test_some_view(self):
    # use follow=True to follow redirect
    response = self.client.get('/some-url/', follow=True)

    # don't really need to check status code because assertRedirects will check it
    self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)
    self.assertRedirects(response, '/some-other-url/')

    # get message from context and check that expected text is there
    message = list(response.context.get('messages'))[0]
    self.assertEqual(message.tags, "success")
    self.assertTrue("success text" in message.message)