Creating Test Data for Rails Apps

I wrote a guest post over at 3 Weeks to Live on our progress in building data sets for testing OnCompare under Ruby on Rails.

The biggest challenge has been generating a large number of records, but I think we can do that with loops and factory_girl:

The other place to use large data is to stress test the system. … I need to know that the algorithm will continue to be responsive when we have 300 products. At this point, I’m looking at running loops around factory_girl calls so that it will generate most of the non-essential information. [Settings] up a single product matrix may take a dozen records, but I can loop over that 300 times and factory_girl will automatically create records with new names (using the sequence method shown in the factory definitions above).

before do
  category = Factory.create(:category)
  300.times do
    product = Factory.create(:product, :category => category)
    12.times do
      Factory.create(:question, :category => category, :product => product)
    end
  end
end

As a follow-up, we also added Faker to our gem set, which has a ton of handy methods for mocking up data. So, for example, I can set up a factory definition with Faker::Lorem.words(3) for the name or description of a product and 300 products will all look different. It’s pretty sweet.