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How do you unit test python code that uses a sqlalchemy filter?

January 27, 2023 ▪ 1 min

There are a few ways to unit test code that uses SQLAlchemy filters in Python. One common approach is to use a test database that is separate from your production database. This allows you to run your tests against a known set of data and ensure that your filters are working correctly.

Another approach is to use a mocking library such as mock or unittest.mock to create mock objects that mimic the behavior of the SQLAlchemy classes. This allows you to test your filters without having to connect to an actual database.

You can also use the SQLAlchemy’s testing.assert_compile to check if the filter is correctly generating the SQL query.

Here’s an example of how you can use unittest.mock to test a function that uses a SQLAlchemy filter:

    from unittest.mock import MagicMock
    from sqlalchemy import create_engine
    from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker

    def test_filter_users(): # Create a mock session object
    session = MagicMock()

        # Create a mock query object and configure it to return a list of users
        query = MagicMock()
        query.filter.return_value = [{'id': 1, 'name': 'John'}, {'id': 2, 'name': 'Jane'}]
        session.query.return_value = query

        # Call the function being tested
        result = filter_users(session, name='John')

        # Assert that the function returned the expected result
        assert result == [{'id': 1, 'name': 'John'}]
        # Assert that the filter method was called with the correct arguments
        query.filter.assert_called_with(User.name == 'John')

It’s important to note that this is just one example of how you can test code that uses SQLAlchemy filters and that the specific implementation details may vary depending on the specific use case.

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