"This field is required" from my Django Form when using Client().post to test even thought form.data shows values in those fields

Question

I'm trying to test some form logic in my views.py and need to simply pass a form to that view in order to do that but I can't figure out why it isn't receiving a valid form when passed using a Client().post from my tests. When using the form from the browser normally it works fine.

I'm using Django test Client submitting a form with a POST request and How should I write tests for Forms in Django? as guidance with no luck after looking at many different resources.

The errors from form.errors shows

name - This field is required

address - This field is required

However my form.data shows

<QueryDict: {"'name': 'foo bar', 'address': '2344 foo st'}": ['']}>

The working live form has the form.data as:

<QueryDict: {'csrfmiddlewaretoken': ['htR...Rel', 'htR...Rel'], 'name': ['test'], 'address': ['test'],'submit': ['Submit_Form']}>

I've played around with getting a "csrfmiddlewaretoken" but I don't feel like that the problem. I've also tried setting the .initial and played around with content type. Is the form.data not what is looked at? form.is_valid() is True before the post to the view.py. Thanks in advance for the help!

My tests code is:

@pytest.mark.django_db def test_add_bar_with_logged_in_user_form(setUpUser, django_user_model):

from ..models.forms import BarForm
from django.test import Client

bar_name = "foo bar2"
address = "2344 foo st"

user = setUpUser 

client = Client()
client.force_login(user=user)

client.login(username=user.username, password=user.password, email=user.email)

form = BarForm()

form_data = {
    "name": bar_name,
    "address": address,
}

form = BarForm(data=form_data)

assert form.is_valid() is True

response = client.post(urls.reverse("add_bar"), form.data, content_type="application/x-www-form-urlencoded", follow=True)

assert response.status_code == 200

The relevant portion of views.py is:

def add_bar(request):

# If this is a POST then the user has submitted the form to add a new bar
if request.method == "POST":

    active_user = auth.get_user(request)

    # Only logged in users should be able to submit
    if not active_user.is_authenticated:
        messages.error(request, "Must be logged in to do that")
        return HttpResponseForbidden("Authentication required")

    form = BarForm(request.POST)

    logger.info(f"*=-===-= form.data : {form.data}")

    if form.is_valid():
        logger.info(f"*=-===-= form.data : {form.data}")
        cleaned_data = form.cleaned_data

        created_by_id = active_user.id

        bar_new = Bar.objects.create(**cleaned_data, submitted_by=active_user)

        messages.success(
            request,
            f" - Thanks! Bar submited.",
        )
        return redirect("index")
    
    elif form.errors:

        errors = form.errors
        messages.error(request, "Form is invalid")

        logger.info(f"** test_add_bar_with_logged_in_user -> form.errors: {errors}")
        for error in form.errors:
            logger.info(f"** test_add_bar_with_logged_in_user -> error: {error}")
        logger.info(f"*=-===-= form.data : {form.data}")
        return redirect("index")
    elif form.non_field_errors():
        for error in form.non_field_errors():
            logger.info(f"** test_add_bar_with_logged_in_user -> error: {error}")
        return False

stujar · Answer 1 · 2023-08-24T21:12:54.963

I pass data via login form but without the content_type="application/x-www-form-urlencoded and it works fine. However; when I added the content_type it failed. This is how I pass the data:

new_login = LoginForm(
    data={'username': 'someone', 'password': 'blah'},
)
self.assertEqual(new_login.is_valid(), True)
response = self.client.post(
    path='/accounts/login/',
    data=new_login.data,
    follow=True,
)

I also have a check inside the view to print if form.is_valid() and it is. The default content_type is MULTIPART_CONTENT as you can see in this older source code, which handles form data.

I did run into a problem when trying to pass multiple forms to a view. In that case, I found that instead of trying to send forms at all, I merely passed a dictionary of the keyword values to data in the post and the forms inside view validated just fine.

I hope this helps!

"This field is required" from my Django Form when using Client().post to test even thought form.data shows values in those fields

1 Answers1