populator

= Populator

RDocs[http://rdoc.info/projects/ryanb/populator] | Screencast[http://railscasts.com/episodes/126-populating-a-database]

Populate an Active Record database with mass insertion.

== Installation

Rails 3 support is currently being worked on. Stay tuned.

In Rails 2, install the gem.

gem install populator

And then load it in a rake task or elsewhere.

require "populator"

== Usage

This gem adds a "populate" method to all Active Record models. Pass the number of records you want to create along with a block. In the block you can set the column values for each record.

Person.populate(3000) do |person| person.first_name = "John" person.last_name = "Smith" end

This will do a mass insert into the database so it is very fast. The person object contains the "id" so you can set up associations.

Person.populate(3000) do |person| person.first_name = "John" person.last_name = "Smith" Project.populate(30) do |project| project.person_id = person.id end end

That will create 30 projects for each person.

Passing a range or array of values will randomly select one.

Person.populate(1000..5000) do |person| person.gender = ['male', 'female'] person.annual_income = 10000..200000 end

This will create 1000 to 5000 men or women with the annual income between 10,000 and 200,000.

You can pass a :per_query option to limit how many records are saved per query. This defaults to 1000.

Person.populate(2000, :per_query => 100)

If you need to generate fake data, there are a few methods to do this.

Populator.words(3) # generates 3 random words separated by spaces Populator.words(10..20) # generates between 10 and 20 random words Populator.sentences(5) # generates 5 sentences Populator.paragraphs(3) # generates 3 paragraphs

For fancier data generation, try the {Faker gem}[http://faker.rubyforge.org].

== Important

For performance reasons, this gem does not use actual instances of the model. This means validations and callbacks are bypassed. It is up to you to ensure you're adding valid data.

== Development

Problems or questions? Add an {issue on GitHub}[https://github.com/ryanb/populator/issues] or fork the project and send a pull request.

See {spec/README}[https://github.com/ryanb/populator/blob/master/spec/README.rdoc] for instructions on running specs.

== Special Thanks

Special thanks to Zach Dennis for his ar-extensions gem which some of this code is based on. Also many thanks to the contributors[https://github.com/ryanb/populator/contributors]. See the CHANGELOG[https://github.com/ryanb/populator/blob/master/CHANGELOG.rdoc] for the full list.