How to mock get_current_user in tornado for unittest?

Question

I have a tornado web application. Many pages require a valid cookie to access. It makes it impossible to test those handlers.

I want to use the mock library to mock the tornado.web.RequestHandler.get_current_user method. But I just cannot get right.

This is how I am doing right now:

class MyUT(tornado.testing.AsyncHTTPTestCase):
  def get_app(self):
    settings = {
      "template_path": '../../../templates',
      "cookie_secret": 'secret',
      "login_url": '/admin/login',
      "debug": True
    }

    return Application([
      (r'/admin/create/super', handlers.CreateSuperUserHandler)
    ], **settings)


  def testGet(self):
    with mock.patch.object(handlers.CreateSuperUserHandler, 'get_current_user') as m:
      m.return_value = {}
      response = self.fetch('/admin/create/super')

    print(response.body)
    self.assertGreater(response.body.index('create'), 0)

If I execute this code, I got a 404 error. Because I did not define the login hanlder. But I am expecting the mocked get_current_user method return a user object, so do not go to the login page while testing.

One strange thing I found is, if I add m.assert_any_call() in the with block, there's no assertion error.

Answer 1

The @authenticated decorator redirects to the login page if get_current_user returns a falsy value. Try returning a non-empty dict.

You also use handlers.CreateSuperUserHandler in one place and handlers.AdminArea.CreateSuperUserHandler in another; are those the same class object?