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zc.testbrowser and Django integration
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Merge pull request #2 from trimailov/master

Add so will be included in sdist
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.gitignore Use zc.buildout for the example application.
LICENSE Copyright updates, make dependency on lxml soft. Add so will be included in sdist Use in-memory cookie jars by default. Add so will be included in sdist


homophony provides zc.testbrowser integration for Django; zc.testbrowser is a lot more robust than the default functional testing client that comes with Django.

See the introduction_ to zc.testbrowser for a better understanding of how powerful it is.

.. _introduction:

Using homophony

First of all, you need to have homophony installed; for your convenience, recent versions should be available from PyPI.

Let's say you're working on an application called foobar; the tests for this application are located in foobar/

Unit tests

Use this as a starting point for foobar/

from homophony import BrowserTestCase, Browser

class FoobarTestCase(BrowserTestCase):

    def testHome(self):
        browser = Browser()'http://testserver')
        browser.getControl(name='first_name').value = 'Jim'
        self.assertEquals(browser.url, 'http://testserver/hello')
        self.assertEquals(browser.title, 'Hello Jim')

Bear in mind that implementing custom setUp and tearDown methods should involve calling those defined in BrowserTestCase.


If you prefer doctests over unit tests (as we do!), use the following as a base for foobar/

from homophony import DocFileSuite

def suite():
    return DocFileSuite('tests.txt')

And here is an example foobar/tests.txt file::

The website welcomes its visitors with a form:

    >>> browser = Browser()
    >>> browser.getControl(name='first_name').value = 'Jim'
    >>> browser.getForm().submit()

When a name is given, it echoes back with an informal greeting:

    >>> browser.title
    'Hello Jim'
    >>> print browser.contents
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <h1>Hello Jim</h1>

And there is a link to go back:

    >>> browser.getLink('Go back').click()
    >>> browser.title


There are some useful helpers on the browser class. You can run XPath queries on HTML documents using queryHTML, like this:

>>> browser.queryHTML('//h1')
<h1>Hello Jim</h1>

When debugging tests, it is sometimes handy to open a browser at a particular point in the test. You can accomplish that by invoking serve:

>>> browser.serve()

This command will start an HTTP server and open a web browser with live access to your application. Use Ctrl-C to stop the server and continue running tests.

There is a known issue that the mini-webserver does not serve static files, so your browser may not be able to access Javascript or CSS used by your app.

The browser will persist cookies accross requests, so things like user sessions should work.

Example application

There is an example Django application in the source distribution. Let's run the tests::

wormhole:example admp$ ./ test -v 2 website
Creating test database...
Creating table auth_permission
Creating table auth_group
Creating table auth_user
Creating table auth_message
Creating table django_content_type
Creating table django_session
Creating table django_site
Installing index for auth.Permission model
Installing index for auth.Message model
testHome ( ... ok
Doctest: tests.txt ... ok

Ran 2 tests in 0.102s

Destroying test database...

The -v 2 parameter is there to get the list of tests printed, and is otherwise unnecessary.

For learning purposes, try to break the tests and witness the details in the output of the test runner.

How does it work?

Custom hooks are installed for urllib to pass all requests for http://testserver to a subclass of WSGIHandler (which exposes Django applications through WSGI_). The real heavy lifting is performed by wsgi_intercept.

.. _WSGI:


There is a home page <>_ with instructions on how to access the code repository.

Send feedback and suggestions to

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