Dummy DS

For as many testing modules as possible I needed a really quick way to set them up. In the past I had a “Builder”, allowing me to easily define components in a WYSIWYG manner.

Now with the simple REST API what I was looking for was actually more simple approach just to define a schema, with automatic GUI generator. Nothing fancy. My favorite tool for this job is HeidiSQL and I wanted to create something similar.

HeidiSQL

So I made a Schema Creator (“Schemator”), where you define some basic attribute properties, like name, label, data type, mode and whether you want it as a column in the main table, or just in the form. Then it generates appropriate schema, or even the whole model. Cool.

According to my experience, in most cases you wouldn't create the schema from scratch or top of your head. You either have a specs, data model or old version of the system. So the next logical step was to create a parser for QElem names pasted from a Clipboard.

To work even better I implemented a guessing of a proper data type, so elem with "is_" prefix probably is a boolean, if it has "date" in the name, it's often a date (duh!) and so on. This worked nice, but it wasn't impressive. And I had an idea for a long time, that would fit nicely in here.

The idea was to have a DataStore for mocking or prototyping, with dummy data, that would actually make some sense. Like for "Date of birth" it wouldn't just generate a random date, but it will be at least some 20 years old to represent an adult employee or user.

Or an e-mail address wouldn't be some random string with @, but if the entry contains name, it would be derived from that in a random format. Some of them will contain last name and a number, some first name and last name in lower case or not, with dot, underscore or nothing in between.

Qedy Schema Creator with auto-generated values. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Similarly for address fields, phone numbers, genders, identifiers and such, not to mention region-specific data sets (for the screenshot above I used my local Czech). The possibilities here are nearly endless.

There are also a simple editor for enumeration options, with paste support and file import.

Impressive, huh? But wait, it doesn't end there. The preview isn't some dumb table, it's actually a real app. In the background it generates a working model for Qedy, that is parsed and rendered into the preview DIV.

And as in a real app, by clicking on the table row you will go to a form for the chosen record, where you can edit values with proper validations, and these changes, after saving, will propagate back to the table.

Basically a working app, only without persistent data. I have to admit I had a blast working on it and I'm proud of the result. I started with an idea to have something, that makes the app in development feel good when showing to someone, and I ended up with something, that feels good showing to someone just by itself :-)

As a cherry on top, to work nicely with HeidiSQL, I added a support for SQL DDL (CREATE TABLE) for both import and export. So now it's super fast to move back and forth between the model and the database. And with proper server-side DataStore (supporting DDL) it's possible to do it directly.