Seeding EE with Sample Data
On Twitter, Andy Harris asked about existing capabilities to seed sample data into EE:
Has anyone made anything that assists with entering a load of test entries without doing them individually? #eecms
— Andy Harris (@andyharris) February 18, 2012
I replied that I thought there was an add-on out there (apparently there’s not) and Greg Ferrell mentioned that he usually just creates a shell script to make that happen.
It would certainly be nice to have native functionality or an add-on that allows you to seed data into EE (I like the Ruby on Rails seed data functionality) from a file and also reset the entries based on the data in that file. This could be done with the Channel Entries API and I know some people have coded one-off solutions with the API to migrate data.
My suggestion to Andy was to use an XML file and the DataGrab add-on from brandnewbox:
@andyharris You could always create an XML file and feed it in with DataGrab. #eecms
— Ryan Irelan (@ryanirelan) February 18, 2012
He had the same idea. So, for now, DataGrab seems like the best option. Have you solved this another way? Let us know in the comments.
Posted on Feb 18, 2012 by Ryan Irelan
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John Faulds — 15:48 on 02.18.2012
There is http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/proxy whose description says it was designed for this purpose but I haven’t actually used it.
Bryant — 16:00 on 02.19.2012
I wrote Proxy to handle this issue with sample data. Its not a perfect implementation, it simply replaces channel entries data with your “pseudo data”, but its helped me quickly test templates without having to create a bunch of test entries
http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/proxy
Jan — 04:18 on 02.20.2012
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Christy Collins — 11:36 on 02.20.2012
I’ve rarely had builds where it would be useful to seed data in this way. Usually it’s more important for me to test the data entry process myself, manually—and have the client do the same. Building out an entry form and field structure that makes sense to the people who will be using it is an important part of the build, and something that definitely goes through iterations early on.