This tests against a bug that was triggered when a linked to object got removed without also removing the reference to it somehow. See http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/8349 and http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/8390 for additional information. As usual, we need to create the necessary links first: >>> self.setRoles(('Manager',)) >>> self.setText(portal.doc1, 'a document') Next we remove the linked-to object, but without removing the according reference to it. To do that we need to suppress the normally fired events. Normally this should never happen, but as the tickets report there are some ways to get end up with dangling reference like this: >>> portal._delObject('doc2', suppress_events=True) Now the reference should be broken: >>> portal.doc1.getReferences() [None] If we now try to update the linking document again in order to remove the link, things used to break raising a ``ReferenceException``. This should be handled more gracefully now: >>> self.setText(portal.doc1, 'foo!') >>> portal.doc1.getReferences() []