When you deliver a training or present a session or even start a new project, you want some test data pre-filled in your application instead of having to start with a fresh empty database.

Sometimes you don’t even need a database, you just want to display a list of customers in a grid to show your audience something, so, lets assume you have a Customer class that has the following definition

public class Customer
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public string LastName { get; set; }
        public string Genger { get; set; }
        public string PhoneNumber { get; set; }
        public string Address { get; set; }
        public DateTime BirthDate { get; set; }
    }

You would normally do the following in your code:

 public ActionResult Index()
        {
            var listOfCustomers = new List<Customer>();

            listOfCustomers.Add(new Customer { Id = 1, FirstName = "John", LastName = "Smith", Address = "Someaddress", BirthDate = DateTime.Now.Subtract(TimeSpan.FromDays(9000)) });
            listOfCustomers.Add(new Customer { Id = 1, FirstName = "Mark", LastName = "Johnson", Address = "Someaddress", BirthDate = DateTime.Now.Subtract(TimeSpan.FromDays(9000)) });
            listOfCustomers.Add(new Customer { Id = 1, FirstName = "Jackson", LastName = "Clark", Address = "Someaddress", BirthDate = DateTime.Now.Subtract(TimeSpan.FromDays(9000)) });
            listOfCustomers.Add(new Customer { Id = 1, FirstName = "Emillia", LastName = "Smith", Address = "Someaddress", BirthDate = DateTime.Now.Subtract(TimeSpan.FromDays(9000)) });

            return View(listOfCustomers);
        }

And the results would be:

Seems good but not very satisfying and requires a lot of work specially if you want to show a lot of records to have paging for example.

GenFu is a very exciting library that can save you all this time, it uses code to generate real-time person information including names, address, birth date  and a lot more.

To use GenFu, all you have to do is to install its package using NuGet package manager, so  from VS, select tools -> NuGet Package Manager -> Package Manager Console and type the following command

install-package GenFu

Then replace the code written above to create list of customers with the following code:

  public ActionResult Index()
        {
            var listOfCustomers = A.ListOf<Customer>(20);

            return View(listOfCustomers);
        }

With just one line of code, it will create a 20 records with real data, and the results will be like this:

To use GenFu to pre fill your database with some records, you can add the same line of code inside the Seed method in your Migration class, just like below

 
 internal sealed class Configuration : DbMigrationsConfiguration<GenFuDemo.Models.CustomersContext>
    {
        public Configuration()
        {
            AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = false;
        }

        protected override void Seed(GenFuDemo.Models.CustomersContext context)
        {
            context.Customers.AddOrUpdate(c => c.FirstName, A.ListOf<Customer>(20).ToArray());
        }
    }

This method will run when you run the update-database command and the data will be inserted into the Customer table

To read more about GenFu, you can visit its GitHub repository, it offers more features like customizing the way it generates or giving hints about some properties that it may not understand, for ex: if you have a property named NightNumber, which is a phone number, in this case you can instruct GenFu using its Fluent APIs to generate phone numbers for the property NightNumber