[TIP] Generating fixture data with the fixture module

Rachel Sanders rachel at trustrachel.com
Wed Nov 21 09:54:33 PST 2012


I'm working with the fixture module for the first time, trying to get a
better set of testing data so I can make our functional tests more complete.

I'm finding the fixture module a bit clunky, and I'm hoping it's just
because I'm going at this wrong. This is a Flask/SQLAlchemy app in Python
2.7, and we're using nose as a test runner.

So I have a set of employees. Employees have roles. There's a few pages in
our app with  complex permissions, and I'd like to make sure those are
tested fully.

I created a DataSet that has each type of role (there's about 15 roles in
our app):

class EmployeeData(DataSet):

  class Meta:
    storable = Employee

  class engineer:
    username = "engineer"
    role = ROLE_ENGINEER

  class manager:
    username = "manager"
    role = ROLE_MANAGER

  class admin:
    username = "admin"
    role = ROLE_ADMIN

and what I'd like to do is write a functional test that checks only the
right people can access a page. (The actual permissions are way more
complicated, I just wanted a toy example to show you.)

Something like this:

def test_only_admin_can_see_this_page():

  for employee in Employee.query.all():
    login(employee)

    with self.app.test_request_context('/'):
      response = self.test_client.get(ADMIN_PAGE)
      if employee.role == ROLE_ADMIN
        eq_(200, response.status_code)
      else:
        eq_(401, response.status_code)

    logout(employee)

Is there a way to generate the fixture data so we don't have to remember to
add a line to the fixtures every time we add a role? We have the canonical
list of all roles as configuration elsewhere in the app, so I have that.

I'm not wedded to any of this or the fixture module, so I'm happy to hear
suggestions!

I also asked this question over at StackOverflow, so if any of the code
doesn't come through right, you can see it there:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13480955/generating-fixture-data-with-pythons-fixture-module

thanks in advance,
Rachel
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