The Bakery Everything CakePHP

Background

We often need a complete, "realistic" and/or "correct" data set during development.

• Good test data help us design the work flow of the app better and decide how much data to put in each view
• When prototyping we need data to show customers how the final app will work
• Perform QA testing with "real" data before any customer is let anywhere near the app
• Last but not least - it's more enjoyable to debug and develop with a funny quote :)

Entering test data is for dummies! So we created this plugin to do it for us.

What it does

This plugin comes with a large selection of data generators (based on a fork of php-faker), including support for foreign keys using the real models if avaiable (so your associated model can change it's id in afterFind() via a behavior if you really want to do mental stuff like that).

The plugin analyzes your tables and selects suitable generators for each field in each table, based on type, name and other criteria.

The generated data is saved using the correct model if available, so any validation, callbacks or behaviors will be applied as normal.

Examples

Some examples of generated data.

Generated Users:

id	firstname	surname	username	email	address	phone	state
15	Prescott	Swanson	prescott00	prescott.swanson@example.com	20469 Barnes Howeow	555 201 640	MD
14	Kylynn	James	kylynn87	kylynn.james@example.com	37060 Gibson Tunneb	555 960 200	ND
13	Kevin	Shaw	kevin75	kevin.shaw@example.com	94307 A5ev Iaxgeys	555 539 746	TX
12	Kelsey	Kim	kelsey32	kelsey.kim@example.com	38597 Stanton xriee	555 299 355	CT

Generated Posts:

id	title	color	description	created	user_id
20	Colossal cool chalk	Blue	Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.	2008-12-19 09:45:41	15
19	Low change	White	Please Don't ask me what the score is, I'm not even sure what the game is.	2008-12-20 06:20:27	12
18	Puny hope	Red	Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.	2009-02-09 01:08:42	3
17	Old-fashioned circle	Cyan	The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.	2008-12-27 16:41:50	6

Default settings where used for all fields except 'User.phone' which had the field 'custom_variable' set to indicate the format of the phone number, and 'Post.created' which had the fields 'custom_min' set to '-2 months' and 'custom_max' set to 'now' to indicate any datetime in the last two months. Notice that 'Post.user_id' has automatically been correctly identified as belonging to the 'User' model.

Settings for Users table:

name	type	allow_null	default	custom_min	custom_max	custom_var
address	street_address	No
email	email	No
firstname	firstname	No
phone	phone	No				555 Xxx xxx
state	us_state_abbr	No
surname	surname	No
username	username	No

Settings for Posts table:

name	type	allow_null	default	custom_min	custom_max	custom_var
color	color	No
created	datetime	No		-2months	now
description	quote	YES
title	title	No
user_id	BelongsTo	No				User

Installation

1. Download the plugin from http://code.google.com/p/alkemann/downloads/list and copy it to your /app/plugins/
2. Enable admin routing in /app/config/core.pp
3. Create a copy of your '$default' db connection in /app/config/database.php and name it '$dummy'
4. Add or change the 'prefix' in your '$dummy' config to e.g. 'dum_' (See example below)
5. Run this in console to create the tables used by Dummy : cake schema run create Dummy -path plugins/dummy/config/sql Alternatively you can use Dummy in "realtime" mode by changing DummyTable and DummyField models to have $useTable = false;

Example database.php file

<?php
class DATABASE_CONFIG {
    var $default = array(
        'driver' => 'mysql',
        'persistent' => false,
        'host' => 'localhost',
        'login' => 'user',
        'password' => 'password',
        'database' => 'stands',
        'prefix' => '',
    );
    
    var $dummy = array(
        'driver' => 'mysql',
        'persistent' => false,
        'host' => 'localhost',
        'login' => 'user',
        'password' => 'password',
        'database' => 'stands',
        'prefix' => 'dum_',
    );

    var $testsuite = array(
        'driver' => 'mysql',
        'persistent' => false,
        'host' => 'localhost',
        'login' => 'user',
        'password' => 'password',
        'database' => 'test_stands',
        'prefix' => '',
    );
}
?>

Configuration (optional)

You can add to or replace the default field type and name matches by creating a 'dummy_config.php' file in /app/config/ containing one or both the following definitions:

<?php
$config['Dummy']['name_matches'] = array( 'field_name' => 'FakerClassName->generator_name' );
$config['Dummy']['type_matches'] = array( 'filed_type' => 'FakerClassName->generator_name' ); 
?>

Example dummy_config.php

<?php
  $config['Dummy']['name_matches'] = array(
     'name' => 'Name->firstname',
      'count' => 'Number->bigInt'
  );
  $config['Dummy']['type_matches'] = array(
      'integer' => 'Number->smallInt'
  );
?>

If you need new generators then you should add the code in the relevant file(s) in the 'phpfaker' vendor.
For documentation on how to do this, check readme in vendors/phpfaker folder.

Go to /admin/dummy/dummy_tables

If this is the first time, Dummy should analyze all your tables and save default settings automatically.

On this page you can :

• Enable and disable data generation for individual tables
• Generate data for individual tables or for all active tables
• Set the number of entries to generate for each table
• Reanalyze all tables

  i.e. reset the table and field settings to default - any changes you have made will be lost

If you click on a table name you will go to the field settings page for that table.

Table field settings page

This page lists the settings for all fields in the table, and on the bottom of the page it lists all the data in the table for easy visual inspection of the data you generate.

This is the main page for controlling the data generation, it allows you to:

• Enable and disable data generation for individual fields
• Generate data for this table
• Empty the table

  WARNING! The table will be TRUNCATED - ALL data will be lost

• Reanalyze the table

  i.e. reset the field settings to default

• Change the generator used for each field

  Select the generator you want from the 'type' drop down menu. The drop down should only contain valid generators for the database field type.

• Customize the generator used by specifying any of three options

  Click the Edit link to set them. These custom values have different meanings depending on the generator.

  min / max

  For numbers it (in most cases) means the minimum and maximum values that the generator make. Date and time generators take in string representations of their min and max values. For most strings, the max value states the maximum number of characters allowed. In Lorem->sentence max is used for the maximum number of words. Look up specific rule for details

  custom variable

  This value is used differently depending on the generator. Most common uses are date and time generators (valid values 'past','now','future') and belongsTo (valid values are existing table or model names). Float uses it to state it's range (defaults to '%01.2f') and Name->firstname and Name->surname can take a custom_variable of 'single' to only return one name.

  examples :

  • For a date type field called "published" you want a value between now and last christmas. You could use a custom_var of "past" and a custom_min of "2008-12-24".
  • For date and time, the min and max values take all strtotime() valid strings, so to get a time of between +/- 2 hours around generation time, use min:'-2hours' and max:'+2hours'

Tips

• If the table has any foreign keys (ie belongsTo) then you should generate the table for the associated model first
• If you are running the plugin in "realtime" mode, you may not change the generator type of fields, but you can use the configuration file 'app/config/dummy_config.php' to set up your app specific rules.
• If you plan on using the "Generate ALL" function, deactivate tables that you dont want filled