Introductory information

For a short abstract of what benerator does, have a look at the benerator home page , for more detailed informations, check the feature list.

The next level of questions should be answered by the FAQ .

Now you should be keen on seeing how benerator works: Several tutorials will introduce you to syntax, usage and API of benerator:

• 'Hello World' tutorial
• flat file generation tutorial
• database population tutorial
• production data anonymization tutorial
• xml file generation tutorial

Getting started

Now, that you have reached this point, it is time to install the current benerator distribution. You can replay the tutorials now. Looking at the examples provided in the distribution's demo directory will provide you with detailed examples how to use benerator. Create your first Benerator project and try examples from the Script Gallery.

If you are primarily populating databases, cross-check it with the Reference Manual in PDF. For XML file generation, check the XML documentation.

Now you can start rolling your own test data. For the first specific data providers you might use some from the domain packages. You can define own nested datasets for structuring import data.

Mastering benerator

You will soon face some data constraints that are too special to be handled generically, like e.g. creating data that fits with special checksum algorithms or strange multi-field constraints. There are many places at which you can plug in own Java code as described in the customizing guide.

Possibly the data format you have to create is too strange to cope with the standard benerator behavior. In such cases you can still fall back to the benerator api and plumb things together as they fit your needs best. Check the api guide and api reference for this task. Best practices help you to work efficiently.

When everything works fine you may want to tune benerator performance.

Further Questions?

Documentation will always be a step behind implementation. If the documentation did not explain well enough, ask me in the help forum.

If you have problems, check the troubleshooting info. If you find a bug, please post it in the problems & bugs forum. For bug fixes on urgent problems, you can fetch the newest sources from the public Subversion repository and build benerator yourself.

If you are missing features, tell me by the feature requests forum.

Benerator is still evolving. Before release 1.0, all interfaces and formats might change in non-trivial ways. I will try to keep changes small for the majority of users, but the deeper you dive into the benerator implementation, the more work you might have in migration. If you are heavily implementing customizations, please get in contact with me - if I know what you are doing, I can try to save upgrade work for you.

If benerator was of use for you, you are welcome to describe your experiences in a field report .