Test client doesn't throw expected 404 error - django

Question

I'm facing a weird error in which a Django test I wrote to test a view's response isn't giving me the expected behavior.
Consider the following model for a simple blogging application:
class Post(models.Model):
"""Represents a Post in the blogging system."""
# is the post published or in draft stage?
STATUS_CHOICES = (
('draft', 'Draft'),
('published', 'Published'),
('deleted', 'Deleted'),
)
# the default mode for posts
DRAFT = STATUS_CHOICES[0][0]
title = models.CharField(max_length=250, null=True)
slug = models.SlugField(max_length=200, blank=True)
text = models.TextField(null=True)
last_modified = models.DateTimeField(default=timezone.now)
date_published = models.DateTimeField(default=timezone.now, null=True)
status = models.CharField(max_length=20, choices=STATUS_CHOICES, default=DRAFT)
category = models.ForeignKey('Category', null=True)
author = models.ForeignKey('Author', null=True)
class Meta:
ordering = ('-date_published',)
#property
def truncated_text(self):
if len(self.text) > 200:
return '{} . . .'.format(self.text[0:300])
else:
return self.text
def publish(self):
self.date_published = timezone.now()
self.status = 'published'
self.save()
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
# Set slug only on new posts
if not self.id:
self.slug = slugify(self.title)
self.last_modified = timezone.now()
super().save(*args, **kwargs)
def __str__(self):
return self.title
Here's the view (you can see that I'm insisting on getting published posts only):
def post_view(request, slug):
post = get_object_or_404(Post, slug=slug, status='published')
return render(request, 'blog/single_post.html', {'post': post})
Here's the URL entry:
url(r'^blog/(?P<slug>[-\w]+)/$', blog_view.post_view, name='single_post'),
And finally, here's the test:
class TestBlogViews(TestCase):
"""Class to test the views of our blog app"""
def setUp(self):
"""Make sure we have an environment in which to render the templates"""
# An author
self.author = Author()
self.author.name = 'Ankush'
self.author.short_name = 'ank'
self.author.save()
# A category
self.cat = Category()
self.cat.name = 'Programming'
self.cat.save()
# A post
self.post = Post()
self.post.title = 'Dummy title'
self.post.text = 'Dummy text that does nuffin'
self.post.author = self.author
self.post.category = self.cat
setup_test_environment()
self.client = Client()
def test_unpublished_post_raises_404(self):
self.post.save()
response = self.client.get(reverse('single_post', args=('dummy-title',)))
self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 404)
So basically, my test fails because I'm getting 200 != 404. I also ran the Post api from shell, and got a DoesNotExist when looking for status = 'published' on a post that only had the save() method called. I also printed the response.content in my test, and it contains the custom 404 template content. Why isn't it throwing 404 when the object clearly doesn't exist? Something wrong with get_object_or_404()?
P.S. Please let me know if you need more snippets of code.

Answer 1

All right, I was able to figure it out. Turns out my custom 404 view was screwed up:
It was:
def not_found(request):
return render(request, 'ankblog/not_found.html')
So naturally the status code was 200. It got fixed by changing it to return render(request, 'ankblog/not_found.html', status=404).
I do find it funny, though. I would've thought that the custom 404 would have raised a 404 error automatically.