I'm currently writing tests for my Django application using pytest and pytest-django. One of my tests involves creating multiple category instances and verifying that they are correctly listed in the API response. Here’s a snippet of the test:
@pytest.mark.django_db
def test_auth_user_can_list_categories(auth_client, category_factory):
categories = category_factory.create_batch(5)
url = reverse("category-list")
response = auth_client.get(url)
assert response.status_code == 200
for i, category in enumerate(categories):
assert response.data[i]["id"] == category.id
assert response.data[i]["name"] == category.name
In this test, I’m creating 5 distinct categories and then using enumerate to loop through them to verify that each category is correctly listed in the API response.
I’m wondering if this approach of enumerating through the categories to match them with the API response is considered a good practice. Are there any better or more efficient ways to test this scenario? Specifically, are there alternative strategies for view testing that could offer more robust or scalable solutions?
I’d appreciate any advice or best practices on how to improve this test or alternative methods to achieve the same results.
It's fine if you mean to also test that the order of the objects from the API is exactly what your category factory creates.
In any case, for a shorter and more robust approach that also has you test that you don't get extra categories in the output, zip(..., strict=True).
...
assert response.status_code == 200
for resp_cat, category in zip(response.data, categories, strict=True):
assert resp_cat["id"] == category.id
assert resp_cat["name"] == category.name