I was working on a small utility which generates XML based upon a given class (which is already XML serializable). I wanted to generate random data just so I could see how the end XML looked in case I needed to tweak the XSD. <\/p>\n
Source for the utility is available on AutoGenXml<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n I figured somebody must have already approached such a problem, and thankfully I was right. There are a few solutions for populating object data. I ended up trying out two different libraries, AutoFixture and NBuilder. <\/p>\n Disclaimer: I have literally only just started using these libraries, so I’ve yet to find all the good and\/or bad points of each library.<\/em><\/p>\n Let’s take a real quick look at what these libraries can do.<\/p>\n Test object<\/strong><\/p>\n Let’s start out by defining an object hierarchy to test this two libraries out on. Mine looks like this<\/p>\n AutoFixture<\/strong><\/p>\n AutoFixture source can be found on AutoFixture<\/a>.<\/p>\n We can create objects with AutoFixture (hence using it as the factory for our objects) and it returns a populated object hierarchy.<\/p>\n Let’s look at the code (it’s pretty simple)<\/p>\n The album<\/em> will now have data in all fields and the Artist and BandMember properties are also created and data supplied. <\/p>\n Whilst it’d obviously be easy enough for us to create an object multiple times if we wanted a list of Albums but AutoFixture also supplies this code to do the same thing<\/p>\n\r\npublic class Album\r\n{\r\n public string Title { get; set; }\r\n public string RecordLabel { get; set; }\r\n public Artist Artist { get; set; }\r\n public string Genre { get; set; }\r\n}\r\n\r\npublic class Artist\r\n{\r\n public string Name { get; set; }\r\n public BandMember[] Band { get; set; }\r\n}\r\n\r\npublic class BandMember\r\n{\r\n public string FirstName { get; set; }\r\n public string LastName { get; set; }\r\n public string Talent { get; set; }\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n\r\nvar fixture = new Fixture();\r\nvar album = fixture.Create<Album>();\r\n<\/pre>\n
\r\nvar fixture = new Fixture {RepeatCount = 10};\r\nvar albums = fixture.\r\n Repeat(fixture.Create<Album>).\r\n ToArray();\r\n<\/pre>\n