How can I unit test django messages?

Question

In my django application, I'm trying to write a unit test that performs an action and then checks the messages in the response.

As far as I can tell, there is no nice way of doing this.

I'm using the CookieStorage storage method, and I'd like to do something similar to the following:

    response = self.client.post('/do-something/', follow=True)
    self.assertEquals(response.context['messages'][0], "fail.")

The problem is, all I get back is a

print response.context['messages']
<django.contrib.messages.storage.cookie.CookieStorage object at 0x3c55250>

How can I turn this into something useful, or am I doing it all wrong?

Thanks, Daniel

Answer 1

I found a really easy approach:

response = self.client.post('/foo/')
messages = list(response.context['messages'])
self.assertEqual(len(messages), 1)
self.assertEqual(str(messages[0]), 'my message')

If you need to check for messages on a response that has no context you can use the following:

from django.contrib.messages import get_messages
messages = list(get_messages(response.wsgi_request))
self.assertEqual(len(messages), 1)
self.assertEqual(str(messages[0]), 'my message')

The fallback storage doesn't support indexing, however it is an iterable.