Can i access the response context of a view tested without the test client?

Question

I have a function which i call from a unittest. From setting some debug traces i know the function worked like a charm and has all the values correctly prepared for return.

This is what my testcode looks like (see where my ipdb.set_trace() is ):

@override_settings(REGISTRATION_OPEN=True)
def test_confirm_account(self):
    """ view that let's a user confirm account creation and username
        when loggin in with social_auth """    
    request = self.factory.get('')
    request.user = AnonymousUser()
    request.session={}
    request.session.update({self.pipename:{'backend':'facebook',
                                           'kwargs':{'username':'Chuck Norris','response':{'id':1}}}})

    # this is the function of which i need the context:
    response = confirm_account(request)
    self.assertEqual(response.context['keytotest'],'valuetotest')

From what i know from this part of the Django docs, i would be able to access response.context when i have used the testing client. But when i try to access response.context like i did it, i get this:

AttributeError: 'HttpResponse' object has no attribute 'context'

Is there a way to get the special HttpResponse object of the client, without using the client?

Answer 1

The RequestFactory does not touch the Django middleware, and as such, you will not generate a context (i.e. no ContextManager middleware).

If you want to test the context, you should use the test client. You can still manipulate the construction of the request in the test client either using mock or simply saving your session ahead of time in the test, such as:

from django.test import Client
c = Client()
session = c.session
session['backend'] = 'facebook'
session['kwargs'] = {'username':'Chuck Norris','response':{'id':1}}
session.save()

Now when you load the view with the test client, you'll be using the session as you set it, and when you use response = c.get('/yourURL/'), you can then reference the response context using response.context as desired.