Hm, I'm not worried about receiving a valid response from the third- party API, just about testing the value of the "msg" parameter that's passed into it. I need to test the msg parameter because it is in turn essentially a proxy for which state was reached in my_view.
my_view is actually a great deal more complex than in the example, and is indeed broken into many smaller function calls. I need to unit test to make sure that the logic is correct -- and since all those function calls return empty HttpResponse objects, I can't use their return values to test the correctness of their logic. Just brainstorming here, could there be a way around this by placing a logging call of some sort in theAPI.call() that would only be executed during unit testing, and then to test the contents of the log? On Jun 20, 6:20 pm, DrBloodmoney <drbloodmo...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Nan <ringe...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm not testing the third-party service. I need to test *what I send > > to them*. I.e. that the output of my_view is correct. The trouble is > > that neither my_view nor the API call actually returns the output that > > I need to check. > > > Does that make sense? > > Mock is one good solution. Here's what I've done in the past > (basically half-assed mock): > > 1. Have representative data sets that are good for the service (eg. > whatever you send to them, and whatever they send you in return). > 2. Monkey patch the call: > > def hackety_patch(): > from StringIO import StringIO > data = StringIO(testdata_response_from_API) > data.seek(0) > return data.read() > > # in TestCase subclass > def setUp(self): > third_party.api.urllib2.urlopen = hackety_patch > > def tearDown(self): > third_party.api.urllib2.urlopen = urllib2.urlopen > > 3. Break up your API calling code into more testable units to truly > isolate your independent code from the API calling code. It'll be much > easier to catch problems in the API integration code. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en.
