Make tests self-contained

[Pablo Fernandez]

Hello,

It would be nice if Django tests, both tests created by users using Django and the Django tests themselves were self-contained in the sense that any test could be run on it's own. This can be achieved by a mix of default settings and using extensively the set up and tear down. I've done it in other projects with similarly complex tests.

Thanks.

[Russell Keith-Magee]

Wouldn't it be great if things were better! Well, yeah, sure... now tell us how to make things better. Preferably in the form of a patch.

The default settings approach doesn't really work, because normal website operation has different configuration requirements to test operation. Unless you're using a custom test runner (like, say, ./manage.py test), there is no way to differentiate the two configuration requirements.

It would be possible to do this using setup() and teardown(), but this would mean that every single setup and teardown method would need to include some common code. Code duplication==bad.

You could do this using subclasses of unittest.TestCase, but then that would prevent you from using the stock unitest.TestCase easily.

The setup/teardown-based suggestions also neglect to provide a solution for doctests, which form a significant portion of the Django test suite.

The only simple approach I can see would be to define a if name == 'main' block on each test file that makes the relevant calls to set up the test environment. This is slightly less code duplication that defining a setup() and teardown(), but still a lot of duplication. With some effort, we might be able to make this a very simple piece of setup, though.

Any other suggestions are welcome. Marking this as someday/maybe until a concrete suggestion is made.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Change UI/UX from NULL to False.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Change Easy pickings from NULL to False.

[Aymeric Augustin]

No concrete suggestion was made since Malcolm's comment.