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There's something I discovered about the Rails framework which I really like, the ability to test the output of templates really easily with css selector, for example test how many "li" elements are in a page, if an element with a certain ID is present, ecc.

AssertContains feels really limited compared to these instruments, check them out: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html#testing-views

How to achieve something similar with django? Is there a python library that implements CSS selectors?

nemesisdesign
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2 Answers2

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django-with-asserts provides a TestCase mixin which allows you to test HTML like:

with self.assertHTML(resp, 'input[name="email"]') as (elem,):
    self.assertEqual(elem.value, 'bob@example.com')
Dustin Wyatt
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You can use Selenium to find elements using CSS selectors, xpath, etc. The driver is specific to a browser, like the Firefox driver, Chrome driver, etc, but it's about the closest you'll get in Django.

See: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/topics/testing/tools/#liveservertestcase

and: http://selenium-python.readthedocs.org/en/latest/locating-elements.html for the selectors available in Selenium.

Vaibhav Shukla
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Brandon Taylor
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    selenium is really cool, but i'm not on that stage of testing yet. I'd like to have something that can be used during early stages of development to test quickly. Django tests with in memory Sqlite run really fast and I love that. Rails test are much slower, but they have few handy functionalities that I think Django could implement and/or make easier. Ever tried lxml.cssselect ? I gave it a try yesterday but it was not as easy as I was hoping for. – nemesisdesign Jan 03 '13 at 12:46
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    You could always render the template, or chunks of templates to string(s) and parse them using a library like lxml or BeautifulSoup to make assertions. – Brandon Taylor Jan 03 '13 at 20:50