Dummy data

"Dummy data" is a data generator gem for your Rails 3 application.

This gem uses dummy to generate dummy data for your models and stores it in YAML files.

It also provides a rake task for you to import it to the database.

Check dummy gem description for a better notion of what exactly is dummy data.

Installation

$ gem install dummy dummy_data

Usage

Add the following to the Gemfile of your Rails 3 application:

gem 'dummy_data'

Now you have access to the generator:

$ rails generate dummy:data

You can change the base amount of records and the growth ratio (what these mean exactly is explained latter on):

$ rails generate dummy:data --base-amount 5 --growth-ratio 1.5

Also, you can manually define the amount of records to generate for each model (or just accept the defaults):

$ rails generate dummy:data --manual-amounts

And you can manually set the output folder for the dummy data (which defaults to test/dummy):

$ rails generate dummy:data --output-folder test/awesome_dummy

The files will be placed under output-folder_/data.

Feel free to mix all of these options.

The fixtures are stored in test/dummy/data (by default) while a rake file is placed in lib/tasks/dummy_data.rake.

It allows you to import the generated data into the database using:

$ RAILS_ENV="dummy" rake dummy:data:import

Don't forget to change RAILS_ENV to the appropriate environment defined in config/databases.yml. Your database doesn't need to be empty.

More information

Smart data

"Dummy data" tells dummy to try to understand your database columns and generate data accordingly, instead of dumping "Lorem ipsum" all over the place.

For instance, if you have a field called company_name, it will generate a company name.

If you have a field called awesome_postal_code, it will generate a valid ZIP Code.

If you have a field called longitude, it will generate a valid longitude, and so on.

You get the picture.

Dummy cares about associations.

It will create random associations between the automatically generated records so you don't have to worry about that.

Smart amounts of data

"Dummy data" is aware that the amount of records that each model has in real world applications is different.

For this reason, it will analyze your model associations to try to make a somewhat accurate estimation of the expected amount of records.

To illustrate this, consider an application with models for Child, Parent and GrandParent. If the base amount is 10, the growth ratio is 2.0 and the models look like the following:

    class GrandParent < ActiveRecord::Base  
      has_many :parents
    end
    
    class Parent < ActiveRecord::Base
      belongs_to :grand_parent
      has_many :children
    end
    
    class Child < ActiveRecord::Base
        belongs_to :parent
    end`

The generator will create dummy data for 10 GrandParents, 20 Parents and 40 Children.

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