How do I modify the session in the Django test framework

Question

My site allows individuals to contribute content in the absence of being logged in by creating a User based on the current session_key

I would like to setup a test for my view, but it seems that it is not possible to modify the request.session:

I'd like to do this:

from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session
s = Session()
s.expire_date = '2010-12-05'
s.session_key = 'my_session_key'
s.save()
self.client.session = s
response = self.client.get('/myview/')

But I get the error:

AttributeError: can't set attribute

Thoughts on how to modify the client session before making get requests? I have seen this and it doesn't seem to work

Answer 1

This is how I did it (inspired by a solution in http://blog.mediaonfire.com/?p=36).

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

class SessionTestCase(TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        # http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/10899
        settings.SESSION_ENGINE = 'django.contrib.sessions.backends.file'
        engine = import_module(settings.SESSION_ENGINE)
        store = engine.SessionStore()
        store.save()
        self.session = store
        self.client.cookies[settings.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME] = store.session_key

After that, you may create your tests as:

class BlahTestCase(SessionTestCase):

    def test_blah_with_session(self):
        session = self.session
        session['operator'] = 'Jimmy'
        session.save()

etc...