Tests

There is a lot of tests and we try to make them “straight to the point”, however we sometime need to use some technics to ease test development. This document will try to resume them.

Freezetime

Most of tests are using FreezeGun decorator like:

@freeze_time("2012-10-15 10:00:00")

This is to avoid playing with date and time in tests since Lotus code sometime use datetime.now(), with FreezeGun we can always set the same datetime and ease asserting on expected date.

Language

Many tests include this kind of code line :

settings.LANGUAGE_CODE = "en"

This is to ensure the test is working in an exact language because Lotus filter content on language and some Django code may involve to set a different language from a test to another.

Using this line, explicitely set the right expected language and avoid that a previously executed tests change it to another one that would make a further test to fail.

Result serialization in JSON

You may see some tests that are serializing and deserializing result payloads with something like:

json.loads(json.dumps(...))

This is a convenient way to ease assertions against expected data because sometime payload contains various Python object that may not be simply asserted. It is much simpler to compare two simple dictionnaries with string than dictionnaries with Python objects inside.

This may not allways work since JSON can only serialize a few set of object types without to declare a custom encoder. Finally this is something you may not use everytime since it may speed down tests.