Unit test an external facing function

Question

I am trying to write unit test case for an external facing api of my Django application. I have a model called Dummy with two fields temp and content. The following function is called by third party to fetch the content field. temp is an indexed unique key.

@csrf_exempt
def fetch_dummy_content(request):
    try:
        temp = request.GET.get("temp")
        dummy_obj = Dummy.objects.get(temp=temp)
    except Dummy.DoesNotExist:
        content = 'Object not found.'
    else:
        content = dummy_obj.content

    return HttpResponse(content, content_type='text/plain')

I have the following unit test case.

def test_dummy_content(self):
    params = {
        'temp': 'abc'
    }
    dummy_obj = mommy.make(
        'Dummy',
        temp='abc',
        content='Hello World'
    )
    response = self.client.get(
        '/fetch_dummy_content/',
        params=params
    )
    self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)
    self.assertEqual(response.content, 'Hello World')

Every time I run the test case, it goes into exception and returns Object not found. instead of Hello World. Uponn further debugging I found that temp from request object inside view function is always None, even though I am passing it in params.

I might be missing something and not able to figure out. What's the proper way to test these kind of functions.

Answer 1

There's no params parameter for the get or any of the other functions on the client, you're probably thinking of data.

response = self.client.get(
    '/fetch_dummy_content/',
    data=params
)

It's the second argument anyway, so you can just do self.client.get('/fetch_dummy_content/', params) too.

Any unknown parameters get included in the environment which explains why you were not getting an error for using the wrong name.