AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get'

Hi, there

Since yesterday, I’m stuck on this error in my test script:

Creating test database for alias 'default'...
E
======================================================================
ERROR: test_create_account (api.accounts.tests.test_crud.AccountTests)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/app/api/accounts/tests/test_crud.py", line 22, in test_create_account
    response = self.client.post(url, data)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/rest_framework/test.py", line 169, in post
    path, data=data, format=format, content_type=content_type, **extra)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/rest_framework/test.py", line 90, in post
    data, content_type = self._encode_data(data, format, content_type)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/rest_framework/test.py", line 65, in _encode_data
    ret = renderer.render(data)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/rest_framework_json_api/renderers.py", line 419, in render
    view = renderer_context.get("view", None)
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get'

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 0.019s

FAILED (errors=1)
Destroying test database for alias 'default'...

Particularly, this is the line of my code causing the error:

response = self.client.post(url, data)

And this is the line of your code that responsible of the error

view = renderer_context.get("view", None)

Simply because renderer_context is None

All my test was passing before switching to this library (using default DRF renders)

Here is my configurations:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'PAGE_SIZE': 5,
    'EXCEPTION_HANDLER': 'rest_framework_json_api.exceptions.exception_handler',
    'DEFAULT_PAGINATION_CLASS':
        'rest_framework_json_api.pagination.PageNumberPagination',
    'DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework_json_api.parsers.JSONParser',
        'rest_framework.parsers.FormParser',
        'rest_framework.parsers.MultiPartParser'
    ),
    'DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework_json_api.renderers.JSONRenderer',
        'rest_framework.renderers.BrowsableAPIRenderer',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_METADATA_CLASS': 'rest_framework_json_api.metadata.JSONAPIMetadata',

    'TEST_REQUEST_RENDERER_CLASSES':(
        'rest_framework_json_api.renderers.JSONRenderer',
    ),
    'TEST_REQUEST_PARSER_CLASSES':(
        'rest_framework_json_api.parsers.JSONParser',
    ),
    'TEST_REQUEST_DEFAULT_FORMAT' : 'vnd.api+json',
}

Am I doing something wrong ?

[abdulhaq-e]

400: Received document does not contain primary data

For creating/updating resources, you have to send a resource object which has to exist under a top level member named data. This is a requirement in JSON API specs.

There was no need to json.dumps(data) thing, why we need it here ?

The renderer does that for you when passing format rather than content_type. To confirm this, go back to DRF serializers and views and try post or patch without json.dumps(data):

response = self.client.post(url, data, content_type='application/vnd.api+json')

An error will be raised.

I believe the renderer in DRF Json API can be enhanced to allow tests such as yours.

[abdulhaq-e]

I think the solution I gave you in the previous comment will work.

In DRF test module, the render method of arenderer instance is being called here. As you can see, only data is passed to this method. There is no renderer_context which then raises an error when using drf-json-api renderer. I gave the JSONRenderer in DRF a quick look and it seems that it works fine if its render method isn’t given a renderer_context. In fact, I think all renderers in DRF behave the same with regards to this aspect. Perhaps it was designed like this for testing purposes. They all have the following line in common:

renderer_context = renderer_context or {}

Anyway, if what I’m saying is correct, passing content_type directly to post leads to a different path where renderer.render is not called, see here

The tests written for this package either used the standard Django Unittest or pytest and some used the testing classes provided by DRF. For the latter, content_type was used when sending data.