Test client session does not behave as stated in the django documentation.

[aaronmerriam@…]

In the documentation for testing, it states that you can run the following code to manually insert values into the test client session.

def test_something(self):
    session = self.client.session
    session['somekey'] = 'test'
    session.save()

​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/topics/testing/overview/#django.test.client.Client.session

In actuality, self.client.session is of type dict and a calling save() raises an AttributeError.

[Baptiste Mispelon]

I can reproduce this issue.

It looks like the nature of client.session can depend on the settings [1] which might be what's causing the discrepancy here.

I'm not sure if that's indicative of a bug in the test client (maybe it should return something other than a plain dict if contrib.sessions is not installed) or if it's a documentation issue (in which case it should be mentionned that the given code only works with contrib.sessions installed).

In any case, I'm marking this as accepted.

Thanks for the report.

[1] ​https://github.com/django/django/blob/ed516a5fc8061615ec94bee37425d4fee8ca872b/django/test/client.py#L373-L382

[Harm Geerts <hgeerts@…>]

There also seems to be a regression in that code from the commit ​https://github.com/django/django/commit/36b164d838c3de168defe9f1ebc02ea1abc790be

>>> from django.test.client import Client
>>> client = Client()
>>> client.session
{}
>>> client.session['var'] = 'val'
>>> client.session
{}
>>> 

A test case which tested the above used to exist but was removed in ​https://github.com/django/django/commit/a935e834433cfc691882c2bbf1249a39abecd35b

[Preston Timmons]

I added a pull request with a fix for this:

​https://github.com/django/django/pull/1832

For reference, this issue was reported in #15740. That was marked as a duplicate of #10899, but I no longer think that is correct. While the feature in #10899 would fix this case, the behavior it tries to add is more clever than it needs to be.

[Tim Graham]

Test on PR does not currently pass (possibly due to upstream changes since the PR was submitted).

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In be88b062afaa58559bb12623e8ed8843f07b97a1:

Fixed #21357 -- Fixed test client session initialization.

The test client will now create a session when it is first accessed
if no session already exists.

[Simon Bächler]

The fix has only been added to the 1.8 branch. In Django 1.7 the behavior is still not the same as stated in the documentation.
​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/testing/tools/#persistent-state

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In d42cbde0:

[1.7.x] Refs #21357 -- Added a working session example to the docs.