Adding a session to a Django request generated by RequestFactory

The Django RequestFactory is a useful tool for writing unit tests against Django views. I was using it to test some code that interacts with Cartridge, and ran into trouble because the RequestFactory doesn’t annotate request objects with Session objects, which is what Cartridge expects.

Turns out you can add the sessions by manually invoking the relevant middleware:

	from django.contrib.sessions.middleware import SessionMiddleware
	def add_session_to_request(request):
	"""Annotate a request object with a session"""
	middleware = SessionMiddleware()
	middleware.process_request(request)
	request.session.save()

view raw

gistfile1.py

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Note that saving the session object seems to be required in order to generate the associated session_key field, which the Cartridge code was looking for.