How to patch a module's internal functions with mock?

Question

By "internal function", I mean a function that is called from within the same module it is defined in.

I am using the mock library, specifically the patch decorators, in my unit tests. They're Django unit tests, but this should apply to any python tests.

I have one module with several functions, many of which call each other. For example (fictitious code, ignore the lack of decimal.Decimal):

TAX_LOCATION = 'StateName, United States'

def add_tax(price, user):
    tax = 0
    if TAX_LOCATION == 'StateName, UnitedStates':
        tax = price * .75
    return (tax, price+tax)

def build_cart(...):
    # build a cart object for `user`
    tax, price = add_tax(cart.total, cart.user)
    return cart

These are part of a deeper calling chain (func1 -> func2 -> build_cart -> add_tax), all of which are in the same module.

In my unit tests, I'd like to disable taxes to get consistent results. As I see it, my two options are 1) patch out TAX_LOCATION (with an empty string, say) so that add_tax doesn't actually do anything or 2) patch out add_tax to simply return (0, price).

However, when I try to patch either of these the patch seems to work externally (I can import the patched part inside the test and print it out, getting expected values), but seems to have no effect internally (the results I get from the code behave as if the patch were not applied).

My tests are like this (again, fictitious code):

from mock import patch
from django.test import TestCase

class MyTests(TestCase):

    @patch('mymodule.TAX_LOCATION', '')
    def test_tax_location(self):
        import mymodule
        print mymodule.TAX_LOCATION # ''
        mymodule.func1()
        self.assertEqual(cart.total, original_price) # fails, tax applied

    @patch('mymodule.add_tax', lambda p, u: (0, p))
    def test_tax_location(self):
        import mymodule
        print mymodule.add_tax(50, None) # (0, 50)
        mymodule.func1()
        self.assertEqual(cart.total, original_price) # fails, tax applied

Does anyone know if it's possible for mock to patch out functions used internally like this, or am I out of luck?

Answer 1

The answer: Clean up your darned imports

@patch('mymodule.TAX_LOCATION', '') did indeed patch things appropriately, but since our imports at the time were very haphazard -- sometimes we imported mymodule.build_cart, sometimes we imported project.mymodule.build_cart -- instances of the "full" import were not patched at all. Mock couldn't be expected to know about the two separate import paths... without being told explicitly, anyway.

We've since standardized all our imports on the longer path, and things behave much more nicely now.