Fun with Angela Smith library by James Chambers for C#

AngelaSmith is an awesome library created by James Chambers. This library is used to generate realistic test data. You can find more information about it from the following link.

https://github.com/MisterJames/AngelaSmith

As per documentation on the github, it is.

AngelaSmith is a library you can use to generate realistic test data. It is composed of several property fillers that can populate commonly named properties through reflection using an internal database of values or randomly created data. You can override any of the fillers, give AngelaSmith hints on how to fill them, or easily extend the property fillers using extension methods or MEF.

It’s an awesome realistic data generator library. You can generate object data as well list also. She can fill anything that you throw it to her.You can use it’s static methods to create objects for testing, design time data or seeding a database.

It’s comes quite handy when some body need realistic data for testing. Or let’s take on scenario in your ASP.NET MVC application you need to create front end and still your database and other things are still not ready so you can not fetch data and your designers are working on  views and now they want to test views so in this kind of scenario this library comes quite handy.

It’s has also got NuGet package also. You can add it via running following command in Package Manager Console in Visual Studio.



You can also install pre build of AngelaSmith if you want they already had CI setup there. You can install that via running following command in NuGet Package Manager Console.

install-package AngelaSmith –Pre

How to use Angela Smith in Your .NET Application

So what’s we are waiting for let’s create a sample console application called AngelaSmithDemo like following.



Once you are done with creating project You need to install NuGet Package for Angela smith as mentioned above via package manager console.



Now it’s time to write a code. I have created following “Employee” Class to demonstrate features of AngelaSmith.

public class Employee
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public string Title { get; set; }
}

Now I want to create object of employee class with dummy data then I can it like following.

using System;
using System.Linq;
using Angela.Core;
namespace AngelaSmithDemo
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Employee employee = Angie.FastMake<Employee>();
            Console.WriteLine(employee.Id);
            Console.WriteLine(employee.FirstName);
            Console.WriteLine(employee.LastName);
            Console.WriteLine(employee.Title);
        }
    }
}

That’s you will get some dummy data as below.



Now suppose you want to create a list of Employee then you can create a list of Employee like following.

List<Employee> employees = Angie.FastList<Employee>();
foreach (var employee in employees)
{
    Console.WriteLine(employee.Id);
    Console.WriteLine(employee.FirstName);
    Console.WriteLine(employee.LastName);
    Console.WriteLine(employee.Title);
    Console.WriteLine(@"----------------------------");
}

Here is the output as expected.



There are variety of options available to create object and list of particular class. You can find all this options at following links.

http://jameschambers.com/angelasmith/
https://github.com/MisterJames/AngelaSmith

That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more.