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Open Source Tools

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Populating your databasewith a few clicks

by José Carréra

© Stephan Koscheck - Fotolia.com

A common obstacle frequently faced by the testing team is the

challenge of having to check several testing scenarios which re-

quire very large amounts of data that could take months to be

obtained in a real production environment. Also, depending on

the domain of the application, it may just not be possible to have

the data made available from production environment due to se-

curity or privacy issues. Therefore, quality assurance teams need

to nd other ways to simulate these scenarios as closely as pos-

sible to real environments, whilst at the same time they usually

face strict time constraints, which makes their work even harder.

Test engineers have at their disposal some solutions to deal withthis matter. However, they are not always easy to use or are not

fast enough. A commonly used approach is to create SQL scripts

manually using a text editor, which is a tedious task that consu-

mes a lot of time. Another possibility is to use specic tools to aid

in this task, allowing the user to quickly and easily generate large

amounts of data. However, it is not easy to nd a suitable open-

source tool that is exible enough to adapt to any type of scenario

and all data types.

A couple of months ago I was introduced to the Data Generator

tool, which according to the website www.generatedata.com is

„a free, open-source script written in JavaScript, PHP and MySQL

that lets you quickly generate large volumes of custom data in a

variety of formats for use in testing software, populating databa-

ses, and scoring with girls“. I still haven‘t discovered how the tool

may help you „score with girls“, but it sure is a great tool to assist

software testing in populating databases.

In this article I will describe the main features of this application,

pointing out ways to better use these features based on our pre-

vious experience using Data Generator in our projects.First Look and Installation

The rst great thing about the Data Generator tool is that you

can try it out without having to install it. After accessing the

application‘s website www.generatedata.com and clicking on

the Generator tab, you will be presented with that same web GUI

that you will have if you later on decide to install it locally on your

machine. The only constraint is that using this “demonstration”

Image 1 - Website Generator version

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version you can only create a maximum of 200 records at a time,

whereas with the locally installed version you may reach 5000 re-

cords at a time.

To install it locally on your machine only a few simple steps need

to be performed. By clicking on the download tab at the website

 you can see what the system requirements are:

• MySQL 4+

• PHP 4+

• Any modern, JS-enabled browser

To fulll these requirements we installed WampServer (www.

wampserver.com), another free, open-source project, which al-

lows us to run Data Generator and all its features. After installing

WampServer just a couple more steps need to be performed. To

start running Data Generator locally on your machine, a simple

ve- step installation procedure is available via the download tab

of the application‘s website. For Data Generator version 2.1, which

is the version we used in our projects, the required steps are:

1. Download the zip-le at the top and unzip the contents lo-cally on your computer.

2. In the zip-le, you‘ll nd a le in the /install folder nameddb_install.sql. This contains all the SQL to create the MySQLtables and raw data used by the Data Generator (names, ci-ties, provinces, states, countries, etc). You will need to execu-te these statements on your database through any databaseaccess tool, such as phpMyAdmin.

3. Edit the global/library.php le. At the top, you‘ll see a sec-tion where you need to enter your MySQL database settings.Note: if you choose to change the database prex, make sure

 you rename the tables after running the SQL in #2!

4. Upload all les to your web server.

5. Upload it to your web browser and get to work.

After this small procedure, you can start using Data Generator.

As we will describe in the next section, it comes with a pre-loaded

database that might help you in several test scenarios.

Explaining its main features

First, I will describe how we can use the pre-loaded user databa-

se to generate data. Almost all applications have a user manage-

ment feature that uses data like name, phone, e-mail, address,

etc. It is also common that at some point during the project life

cycle we need to use a larger amount of user data, in order to as-

sess how the system behaves in dierent test scenarios that may

focus on features like response time, data integrity, general user

interface, and many others.

On the Data Generator main screen you will be able to dene on

each row a data type for each column of the table that you wantto populate. For each row, the user can dene a column title and

its data type along with its specic settings. Dierent types of 

pre-loaded data types will be available like: name, phone/fax, e-

mail, city, and others. These data types allow us to solve dierent

issues, by attending various test scenarios.

Image 2 - Available data types

Image 3 - Dates / pre-dened formats

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Among the pre-loaded data types, the “Date” option is one of the

most useful, presenting a relevant group of variations, as shown

in image 3. The “Date” option allows us to solve a common pro-

blem faced when generating data, which is that each database

management system uses dierent date formats. With this de-

ned data type, we can solve this issue with a few clicks selecting a

date format and setting the desired date interval.

The pre-loaded data can be used in isolation or together with

custom data types like alpha-numeric and custom lists, which

are two dierent data types available where the user can enter

specic custom values. If you select custom list, you can choose

among some pre-loaded available lists like: marital status, colors,

titles, company names, etc., or you can dene a customized list

by entering values separated by a pipe | character. You may also

dene before generation the number of values that you want to

be included in each record.

You can also choose alpha-numeric data types, where you can eit-

her dene a specic static value which will be repeated for each

created record or use its feature that allows the generation of 

random values. To do so, you need to follow some dened rulespresented below in image 4. For instance, if you set the value eld

to LLLxxLLLxLL, records will be generated replacing the ‚L‘ for ran-

dom upper-case letters and the ‚x‘ for any number from 0 to 9.

Image 4 - Alpha-numeric data type rules

Another important and useful data type available is the auto-

increment, which we can use to generate a unique number for

each row by incrementing an initial congured value by whatever

value you enter. This functionality is very helpful for setting nu-

meric values commonly used for primary keys on database tables.

Finally, we present the settings that are available for genera-

ting records. Initially, the user can choose among the dierentexporting formats, a feature which has shown to be very useful

considering that we might use the generated data in dierent si-

tuations, like using it to import via the application‘s front-end (if 

available) or data importing directly via the system‘s DBMS (Data

Base Management System). We can also choose betweem die-

rent settings of the pre-loaded database, choosing which country

we want the records to be retrieved from, allowing more precise

information. Last but not least, we must dene the number of 

results or records that we need to be generated for the selected

conguration (as mentioned before, we can reach 5000 records

at a time with the locally installed version).

Remember that I am not trying to describe a perfect tool that can

solve all your problems. You might nd some drawbacks, limita-

tions and also nd yourself having to adapt the available data ty-

pes to your needs. However, that’s the great thing about an open-

source project; you can help to make it get better by improving

its features, adding new ones, xing bugs or just by exchanging

ideas with developers and providing important feedback for fu-

ture releases.

Conclusion

Technologies applied on software projects get more complex eve-

ry day, along with a greater challenge for quality assurance teams

to assist the development team in releasing products with higher

quality standards, capable of complying with user needs and ful-

lling expectations.

To achieve these demands, the usage of tools to assist the work

performed by the quality assurance team is primordial. Allowing

engineers to provide faster and more accurate results to their

projects, Data Generator seems to be a great option, providing

test teams with a suitable solution for populating databases.

In this article, we presented the main features of Data Generator.

Special thanks go to Benjamin Keen, responsible for the develop-

ment and distribution of the tool. For further information regar-

ding this tool or the challenges that it might help solving, please

contact the author.

Image 5 - Results settings

José Carréra, MSc, is a test engineer at C.E.S.A.R. (Re-cife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems) since2006 and Professor of Computer Science at FATEC(Faculdade de Tecnologia de Pernambuco), Brazil,since 2010. He obtained his master degree in soft-ware engineering (2009), graduated in computerscience (2007), and is a Certied Tester — Founda-tion Level (CTFL), by the ISTQB® (International Soft-ware Testing Qualications Board - 2009). His mainresearch interests include quality assurance, Agilemethodologies, software engineering, performancetesting, and exploratory testing.

Biography