Grow your app from seeds

Starting your app? Need some data? Larger amounts of data are an oft overlooked part of interface design and flow. Most people consider tens or hundreds of pieces of data in a design, but what about thousands or hundreds of thousands of items? Do you need more than just pagination, maybe a search interface?

We had these same issues with Tastyplanner ^1^, we exploded from hundreds of chefs and recipes to thousands of them almost overnight.

Planting your data

I’ve been helping out some local friends with some work lately, and one of the things they wanted was a bunch of seed data that gets loaded based on the environments. A rake seed task was added in Rails 2.3 ^2^. The rake task loads up db/seeds.rb, which you can coerce to do whatever you want.

Feed it with [ENV]

Our approach to the problem was simple - use yaml and csv files to load up the data. Here is what we started with:

This takes any files in the based of db/seed that ends in .yml or .csv and loads them up as fixtures and pushes them into the database. That is great but it doesn’t cover the environment based loading. With a few quick mods, here is what we came up with:

Voila! Now all data in db/seed/* is loaded for all environments, but db/seed/production and db/seed/development will only load for their respective environments!

Pour on a little MODEL

Now, I am sure you are thinking, “Where are you getting all this data”? From the models and database, of course! I am sure I could have used some gross looking database query to export a csv file for me, but we’re rubyist! I fired up a quick rake task to take MODEL and FILE arguments and output a csv file from the models table. Here is the finished task:

Watch it all grow with some Faker

I can see that last thought brewing in your head, “Where did the data come from? Surely you weren’t typing in 500-1000 rows of data?”. Indeed, you would be correct, we didn’t type it all in. We used the Faker gem and just good ole’ script/console with some copy/paste action. Here is an example:

One important note, when you use rand(#) be sure to add + 1 unless you want a zero returned.

Put it all together

Putting all this code together in the right sequence will have you ending up with a database full of fake people, a seed directory full of csv files, and a loaded app ready for your designers and UI experts.

Links

[1] Tastyplanner
[2] Rails 2.3 Commit