Surfing in Kansas

Today I ran into a fun problem when writing template tags at work. (I'll write another post later on the fun-ness that is testing of template tags :) In ellington we have some templatetags that test for the current time of day. ifmorning, ifnight and so on. These template tags are using datetime.datetime.now() to check to see if the time is within a certain range. This is impossible to test in a standard way without doing some hacking on the datetime.datetime object.

The solution is actually pretty easy. Let me warn, although this is the correct solution in this case, monkeypatching is generally BAD. You don't want to just be playing around with python or django's stdlib and breaking things for other people. With that warning, let me show you how I went about doing this.

This code is called in this fashion:

import unittest
class LoadDateutil(TemplateTestCase):
    def test_load(self):
        olddatetime = datetime.datetime
        datetime.datetime = make_datetime(5)
        self.assertEqual(self.render(u'{% load dateutil %}{% ifnight %}Hi{% endifnight %}'), u'')
        datetime.datetime = olddatetime

Now let me explain what all is going on here. TemplateTestCase is an internal base class for doing templatetag tests. This will probably be released (by me or Matt Croydon) sometime soonish.

The first thing you want to make sure you do is leave everything how you found it. So before we go about editing the datetime.datetime object, we save it into olddatetime, and once we are done with the test, we return datetime.datetime back to its original value. In the middle of the test, we are calling datetime.datetime = make_datetime(5) which is returning a datetime.datetime object that has it's now() method overwritten. The argument to make_datetime is the hour of the day you want to represent.

Let's take a look at how make_datetime is working:

import datetime
def make_datetime(hour):
    class MockDatetime(datetime.datetime):
        @classmethod
        def now(cls):
            return datetime.datetime(2007, 1, 1, hour)
    return MockDatetime

This code is creating the MockDatetime class, and then defining the now() method. The @classmethod decorator must be used because the now() method is a class method. Then the now() method simply returns a datetime.datetime object with the correct hour in it.

This is pretty simple, and is the correct and best way to do testing of this nature. I hope this is helpful to someone out there :) Also note that these methods are not django specific, and can be used in anything with python.

As a caveat, make sure that the templatetag code you are running this test against is importing the datetime module, and not datetime.datetime, because in that instance this code will not work (because the code we're overwriting will be re-imported in the templatetag (as far as I can tell))

Thanks to Malcolm for helping me with this.