Question

To be able to see how my django application looks like, and performs with lots of data, i would like to programmatically generate data in the database. In the django documentation they propose either using fixtures oder SQL statements, but i would rather use a simple python loop to generate thousends of random entries by using the django model classes.

How can i execute such a script? I am using south for database migration, but even there such generation of data seems not to be supported.

Answer 1

You can use django-whatever (enhanced django-any) – it easily creates dummy data.

Here is my sample (in *app_name*/management/commands/dummyitems.py):

class Command(BaseCommand):
    args = '[count]'

    def handle(self, count=20, *args, **options):

        try:
            i = int(count)
        except ValueError:
            print u'n is to be a number!'
            sys.exit(1)

        for _ in xrange(i):
            # you can pass params explicitly
            m = any_model(MY_MODEL_CLASS, image=None)
            m.save()

And so if I need 100 dummy items I run:

$ python manage.py dummyitems 100