Automatic fixtures for HTTP Response assertions

As stated in the “Database state assertion” article: I’m pretty lazy when it comes to writing tests for existing code, however, I’m even lazier when it comes to repetitive manual testing action.

When my user tests my website, they browse it and check that everything is rendered fine. In the same fashion, django-responsediff eases doing the high-level assertions of page HTML rendering.

Consider this example:

    class TestYourView(TestCase):
        def test_your_page(self):
            result = test.Client().get(your_url)

            # Factory to create a Response for this test
            expected = Response.for_test(self)

            # Generate the fixture if necessary, otherwise GNU diff-it
            expected.assertNoDiff(result)

On the first run, this would create a directory in the directory containing TestYourView, named responsediff_fixtures, with a sub-directory TestYourView.test_your_page and a file content with response.content in there, if it does not already exist, and raise FixtureCreated to inform the user that no test has actually been run, and that the fixture has just been created.

User should add the generated fixture to the repository. Then, next time this test is run, it will run GNU diff between response.content and the previously-generated fixture, if a diff is found then assertNoDiff() will raise a DiffFound exception, printing out the diff output.

Of course, a lot of new features are possible and will come when their need becomes an impediment for one of us djangonauts, some ideas:

• store response headers and compare them too,
• tests only bits of the contents,
• why not even a spider that would crawl the website and create tests, but that’s what django-test-utils, unfortunnately unmaintained used to do.

Happy testing !!