Validating trello board API responses in Python unittest - json

Question

I am writing a unittest that queries the trello board API and want to assert that a particular card exists.
The first attempt was using the /1/boards/[board_id]/lists rewuest which gives results like:
[{'cards': [
{'id': 'id1', 'name': 'item1'},
{'id': 'id2', 'name': 'item2'},
{'id': 'id3', 'name': 'item3'},
{'id': 'id4', 'name': 'item4'},
{'id': 'id5', 'name': 'item5'},
{'id': 'id6', 'name': 'item6'}],
'id': 'id7',
'name': 'ABC'},
{'cards': [], 'id': 'id8', 'name': 'DEF'},
{'cards': [], 'id': 'id9', 'name': 'GHI'}]
I want to assert that 'item6' is indeed in the above mentioned list. Loading the json and using assertTrue, like this:
element = [item for item in json_data if item['name'] == "item6"]
self.assertTrue(element)
but I receive an error: 'TypeError: the JSON object must be str, bytes or bytearray, not 'list'.
Then discovered using the /1/boards/[board_id]/cards request gives a plain list of cards:
[
{'id': 'id1', 'name': 'item1'},
{'id': 'id2', 'name': 'item2'},
...
]
How should I write this unittest assertion?

Answer 1

The neatest option is to create a class that will equal the dict for the card you want to ensure is there, then use that in an assertion. For your example, with a list of cards returned over the api:
cards = board.get_cards()
self.assertIn(Card(name="item6"), cards)
Here's a reasonable implementation for the Card() helper class, it may look a little complex but is mostly straight forward:
class Card(object):
"""Class that matches a dict with card details from json api response."""
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = name
def __eq__(self, other):
if isinstance(other, dict):
return other.get("name", None) == self.name
return NotImplemented
def __repr__(self):
return "{}({!r}, {!r})".format(
self.__class__.__name__, self.key, self.value)
You could add more fields to validate as needed.
One question worth touching on at this point is whether the unit test should be making real api queries. Generally a unit test would have test data to just focus on the function you control, but perhaps this is really an integration test for your trello deployment using the unittest module?

Answer 2

import unittest
from urllib.request import urlopen
import json
class Basic(unittest.TestCase):
url = 'https://api.trello.com/1/boards/[my_id]/cards?fields=id,name,idList,url&key=[my_key]&token=[my_token]'
response = urlopen(url)
resp = response.read()
json_ob = json.loads(resp)
el_list = [item for item in json_ob if item['name'] == 'card6']
def testBasic(self):
self.assertTrue(self.el_list)
if __name__ == '__main__':
unittest.main()
So what I did wrong: I focused too much on the list itself which I got after using the following code:
import requests
from pprint import pprint
import json
url = "https://api.trello.com/1/boards/[my_id]/lists"
params = {"cards":"open","card_fields":"name","fields":"name","key":"[my_key]","token":"[my_token]"}
response = requests.get(url=url, params=params)
pprint(response.json())