This function mocks the response the call to get messages from an Amazon SQS Queue...which is handy for testing when you don't want to make real calls to your SQS queue. The MESSAGE_BODY_TEMPLATE is simply a dictionary where the keys represent the keys in the output JSON message and the value represents a function to cast the appropriate datatyp…

mock_sqs_data.py

from boto.sqs.jsonmessage import JSONMessage
 
MESSAGE_BODY_TEMPLATE = {
    'article_id': int,
    'owner_id': int,
    'auth_token': str
}

NUMBER_OF_MESSAGES = 10
 
def mock_sqs_data():
 
    def make_message_body(message_body_template, dummy_value):
        output = {}
        for k in message_body_template.keys():
            apply_datatype = message_body_template[k]
            output[k] = apply_datatype(dummy_value)
        return output
 
    output = []
    
    for n in xrange(1, NUMBER_OF_MESSAGES):              
        message = JSONMessage()
        message_body = make_message_body(MESSAGE_BODY_TEMPLATE, n)
        encoded_body = message.encode(message_body)
        message.set_body(encoded_body)
        output.append(message)

    return output