Passing collection property as a parameter to an operator without UI

Question

I have some automated tests setup for one of my add-ons. However, one of my operators initializes its own collection property parameter upon invoke() - which doesn't get called when running an operator from a script. How do I initialize and set the collection property parameters for a given execution?

Here is example code, derivative of Blender API : pass collection as parameter of python operator:

import bpy

class Item(bpy.types.PropertyGroup):
    is_true: bpy.props.BoolProperty()

class ExampleOperator(bpy.types.Operator): 
    bl_idname = "object.example_op"
    bl_label = "Example Operator"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER'}   

    collection: bpy.props.CollectionProperty(type=Item)

    @classmethod
    def poll(self, context):
        return True

    def execute(self, context):
        for item in self.collection:
            print(item.name, item.is_true)
        return {'FINISHED'}

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(Item) 
    bpy.utils.register_class(ExampleOperator)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Any suggestions ? Tried with PointerProperty, but don't know exactly how to use it, and got same error. Thanks :)

Answer 1

You can pass a dict which the operator will use to initialize the collection parameter. Here's how I called the operator in my script:

import bpy

bpy.ops.object.example_op(
    collection=[{'name': 'first_key', 'is_true': True},  {'name': 'second_key', 'is_true': False}]
)