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