Data Spring

:warning: Data Spring is still very much in an experimental and beta state. As a result, features and implementation likely will change.

Data Spring generates fake datasets geared towards dashboards and data visualizations. Sure a lot of libraries already exist for generating fake data, but I was not able to find a solution that was well tailored for these use cases. Data Spring is designed with the use case of generating datasets for prototyping data driven dashboards and data visualizations. As a result, it is fast and easy to create things like large time series datasets using Data Spring.

Data Spring is available both as a JavaScript library as well as a standalone CLI. Instructions for using both are included below

Getting Started

The Data Spring command-line interface (CLI) can be used generate fake datasets from a provided json config file and output the results to a specified json file.

Install the package globally using yarn or npm.

# yarn
yarn global add data-spring-cli

#npm
npm install data-spring-cli -g

Create a config.json file in your project that looks something like the following. Tip: You can run data-spring config <config-file> to generate a boilerplate config file.

The config file is how you define the shape of your dataset (i.e. creating fields and possible values for them).

const config = [
  { "id": "rec_id", "type": "id" },
  {
    "id": "date",
    "type": "date",
    "interval": {
      "type": "month",
      "recordsPerInterval": 2,
    },
    "min": "2020-01-01 00:00:00",
    "max": "2020-12-01 00:00:00",
  },
  {
    "id": "department",
    "type": "string",
    "values": ["Transportation", "Environment", "Health", "Parks"],
  },
  {
    "id": "budget",
    "type": "number",
    "min": 10000,
    "max": 100000,
  },
];

Next, run the cli using your config file, passing the path to your config file as well as the path to where you want the data to be output.

data-spring <config-file> <output-file>

That's it! Open up the output file and you should see your generated dataset.

CLI Commands

1. create
2. config

create

data-spring create <config-file> <output-file>

| Argument | Description | | ----------- | ---------------------------- | | config-file | Path to the JSON config file | | output-file | Path to the JSON output file |

config

data-spring config <output-file>

| Argument | Description | | ----------- | --------------------------------------- | | output-file | Path for the generated config JSON file |

Examples

• Create a new dataset based on a config file in your current working directory. Output a the dataset in the same directory.

data-spring create config.json output.json

config

• Create a new config file based off of the starting template called config.json in the current working directory.

data-spring config config.json