How to mock NSURLConnection.sendAsynchronousRequest in unit testing?

What is the best way to get started with unit testing in django?

• I've Googled around for the best resources on introductions to unit testing in django, and haven't found much that is helpful. Lots of the examples are too simple, and it seems that you need a lot of effort into setting up fixtures, or figuring out how to mock requests that come close to approximating what a user would actually do. Right now I'm using Django's TestCase. For someone who is new to unit testing in django, do you have good resources or recommendations beyond a first google? How do you simulate requests, logged in users, ..., and what kind of things would you validate? Do you need fixtures do anything useful? How close can you get to making test requests like real requests?

• Answer:

  I think you may be confusing unit-tests with integration-tests. unit-tests are meant to evaluate the views as functions/callables in a fully-procedural way, that is: give an input, compare the output with the expected result. if you want to simulate user behavior you should do integration, that is what Selenium is for. regarding login, Django's documentation shows you a way to login users from within the tests but for this you need users on the database and that's what fixtures are for; the best to do that is to run the application with an empty database, create the tests users using your normal registration process and then dump that into a fixture (with the dumpdata command), you can tell your tests to use that fixture and then you'll have your users for the login. the problem with fixtures is that they need to be updated when the models change so there's some apps that create test data on the fly to deal with this, there's factory_boy and django_factory and maybe others.