Thursday, September 20, 2007

random_data gem released

I just released my first Ruby gem. I have a library of functions that I use for generating realistic data so I can have more meaningful examples to work with during development. So I used the newgem generator and hoe to package it all into a gem called random_data.

It provides a Random singleton class with a series of methods for generating random test data including names, mailing addresses, dates, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and text. This lets you quickly mock up realistic looking data for informal testing.

Instead of:

>> foo.name = "John Doe"

You get:

>> foo.name = "#{Random.firstname} #{Random.initial} #{Random.lastname}"

>> foo.name
=> "Miriam R. Xichuan"

The gem also includes code for phone numbers, e-mail addresses, physical addresses, and (primitive) text generation.

You can install it via:


sudo gem install random_data

For more details and full documentation, visit the rubyforge site.

Labels: rails, ruby

3 Comments:

At August 26, 2008 7:27 PM , Con said...: How does one require your gem? I have tried

require 'random_data'

which produced the following error message:

irb(main):002:0> require 'random_data'
LoadError: no such file to load -- random_data
from (irb):2:in `require'
from (irb):2
At August 26, 2008 7:56 PM , Con said...: OK, I resolved the issue. I needed to do the following:

require 'rubygems'
require 'random_data'
At August 28, 2008 8:22 AM , Mike Subelsky said...: glad you were able to get it working! In Ruby 1.9 I believe rubygems is standard, so you won't have to require it separately.