SeedPacket Examples

version 2 in C#

Created by Will Crowther

25,000 Rows Example

This example shows how you can create 1000 Account records, that each have from 1 to 4 Invoices, which each have from 1 to 8 InvoiceItems. The intention here is to show that you can have some complex nested data structures with large numbers of seeded items and it still be performant.

If you look at the code in the controller, we are pre-generating a list containing 20,000 rows of InvoiceItems and 4000 rows of invoices. These cached lists are then used by the "getRandomInvoiceItems" and "getRandomInvoices" rules which utilize the Funcs.GetCacheItemsRandom() and Funcs.GetCacheItemsNext() methods to get either a number of random items or a number of the next sequential items from a cached list. The Funcs.GetCacheItemsRandom() menthod usually takes 150% longer (or more) to process due to the overhead of randomizing the order of items returned.

The number of items taken is driven by the min and max parameters. To get a static number of items, just set both parameters to the same number. The item is removed from the cached list by default after being retrieved. Setting the "remove" parmeter to false if will leave the item in the cached list, if that is desired. If there are no more items in the cached list, the method will fail silently, so it is best practice to manually estimate how many rows are required ahead of time.

Calculated on the fly, it took: 2724 milliseconds to generate these 25,000 rows of data.

The source code also shows an example that breaks out the GetInvoices() rule into an external function. This example shows how to apply extra logic to make the Invoice.AccountId match the actual AccountId in the Account it is nested under. Breaking the logic into an external function is also useful for debugging the logic...