Tag Archives: whoosh

Testing with Django, Haystack and Whoosh

The problem: you want to test a [Django][django] view for results of a search query, but [Haystack][haystack] will be using your real query index, built from your real database, instead of an index built from your test fixtures.

Turns out you can generalise this for any Haystack back-end by replacing the `haystack.backend` module with the simple back-end.

from myapp.models import MyModel
from django.test import TestCase
import haystack

class SearchViewTests(TestCase):
fixtures = [‘test-data.json’]

def setUp(self):
self._haystack_backend = haystack.backend
haystack.backend = haystack.load_backend(‘simple’)

def tearDown(self):
haystack.backend = self._haystack_backend

def test_search(self):
results = SearchQuerySet().all()
assert results.count() == MyModel.objects.count()

My first attempt at this made changes to the project settings [and did `HAYSTACK_WHOOSH_STORAGE = “ram”`][ram] which works but was complicated because then you have to re-build the index with the fixtures loaded, except the fixtures [don’t get loaded in `TestCase.setUpClass`][setupclass], so the choice was to load the fixtures myself or to re-index for each test. And it was specific to [the Whoosh back-end][whoosh] of course.

(This is for Django 1.4 and Haystack 1.2.7. In my actual project I get to deploy on Python 2.5. Ain’t I lucky? On a fucking PowerMac G5 running OS X Server 10.5 [for fuck sacks][bug].)

[django]: https://www.djangoproject.com/
[whoosh]: http://bitbucket.org/mchaput/whoosh
[haystack]: http://haystacksearch.org/
[setupclass]: http://docs.python.org/2/library/unittest.html#unittest.TestCase.setUpClass
[ram]: https://django-haystack.readthedocs.org/en/v1.2.7/settings.html#haystack-whoosh-storage
[bug]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZtpAxDEzl8