Testing Dajaxice Views in Django

If you want to test Dajaxice views from the Django test client, this might be your first approach:

url = '/dajaxice/apps.front.add_vote/'
data = {'vote': 'yes', 'primary_key': '1'}
response = self.client.post(url, data=data)

This doesn't work for several reasons.

First of all, we need to simulate an AJAX request. Therefore the HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH header needs to be set. We can do this by simply passing it as a kwarg to the client.post method.

Furthermore, the default data encoding is multipart/form-data, which is not what we want. Dajax uses application/x-www-form-urlencoded encoding. We can solve this by setting the content_type kwarg.

The third problem is that we can't simply urlencode the data dictionary directly. The JSON formatted payload should be the value of a key called argv.

Here's a solution that works:

import urllib
import json

url = '/dajaxice/apps.front.add_vote/'
payload = {'vote': 'yes', 'primary_key': 1}
data = {'argv': json.dumps(payload)}

response = self.client.post(url,
    data=urllib.urlencode(data),
    content_type='application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH='XMLHttpRequest')