I am new to Django and unit tests, so any feedback is very helpful.

I built a small integration with a third party to create a matching account in their system whenever an account is created in our system. I do this on a signal in the model class. The signal is simple and looks like this:

@receiver(post_save, sender=Company)
def create_integration_company(sender, instance, created, **kwargs):
    if created:
        company_integration_id = third_party.create_crm_company(instance)
        instance.integration_id = company_integration_id
        instance.save()

When I ran our tests, it created thousands of accounts in this third party's system, so I discovered mock.

We have a bunch of tests that create companies and I was wondering if I have to add this to every one of them? @mock.patch("apps.accounts.utils.build_request", return_value="123")

My question is: at which level should I mock the response and just return 123 for the new integration id? Can I do it at the model level? Or do I have to do this for every test case we have?

CodePudding user response：

Mocking will work but the better option would be to disconnect the signals for the unit tests. Please see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/topics/signals/#disconnecting-signals on how to disconnect signal. You can create a test-only mixin which you can include in your test suite. Ideally, you can do this in mixin's init or setUpClass. Say the mixin is SignalDisconnector, which you will use as:

class TestSuite(TestCase, SignalDisconnector)

This will only test the behavior which you are intending in the test suite without experiencing any side effects.