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Generate Test data using Bogus

On one of the projects I’m working on, we needed tons of test data to feed our integration tests. Before we carefully crafted the test data ourselves which worked but was a time consuming and cumbersome process. We got quite bored doing this and decided it was time to find a better alternative.

We ended up using Bogus.

From the documentation:

Bogus is a simple and sane fake data generator for .NET languages like C#, F# and VB.NET. Bogus is fundamentally a C# port of faker.js and inspired by FluentValidation's syntax sugar.

Bogus will help you load databases, UI and apps with fake data for your testing needs.

Getting started

To get started with Bogus, you first need to install the NuGet package in your test project:

Install-Package Bogus
Next step is to create a Faker object and specify the rules for all your properties:
Some of the features of Bogus I really like are:
  • Support for multiple locales: You can generate test data in multiple languages
  • Generate default object data:  You can easily generate realistic test data for a large set of objects like countries, addresses, persons, creditcards, emailaddresses,…
  • A fluent API: Thanks to the Fluent api configuring your rules becomes easy as pie

Remark: If you find the default Fluent API too repetitive, you can use the Bulk api instead:
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