I worked on adding tests to some Django forms today and I was reminded that Django forms operate in two modes. I think of them as the GET mode and the POST mode. The GET mode displays the form and the POST mode processes the data that you supply to the form. I don’t know why, but I often forget that. Instead, I sometimes treat them as a normal Python class, especially when I’m creating automated tests for them. I instantiate the class (form = MyForm()) and then just call any of its methods and make sure they return the right values or achieve the correct side effects. The form that I was working with today had a couple features. The first was that it provided some helper functions to the template so that the template could display the form properly. Those are in the GET mode. So I did something like:

user = create_my_special_user()
form = MyForm(user=user)
self.assertTrue(form.is_user_special())

And that worked as I expected. The second feature of my custom form was that it cleaned the data in a particular way. So I did:

form = MyForm(user=user)
cleaned_data = form.clean()
self.assertEqual(cleaned_data, expected_data)

Instead of passing, the test blew up:

AttributeError: 'MyForm' object has no attribute 'cleaned_data'

Why? Because the clean() method is called when you provide it with POST data (normally… there are also other ways to populate forms). If you don’t supply it data, then cleaned_data doesn’t get populated. The answer is to provide data to the form:

form = MyForm(user=user, data={})
cleaned_data = form.clean()
self.assertEqual(cleaned_data, expected_data)

And that works as expected. The reminder to myself is to always identify which mode of the form you are testing, GET or POST.