Generator script

Nico, what is the status of this? Isn't it done?

Reassigning this to moodle.com for the time being, since Mark Nielsen is not maintaining Lesson any more. Please comment/vote/patch any crucial bugs that affect you for 2.0 to help us prioritise fixes for the upcoming release.

Patch in MDL-25796 and commits on github:
https://github.com/enovation/moodle/tree/MDL-16177
will make the generator script usable again.

After those two are merged, there will be still work left on MDL-16420 - this can be done on module by module basis.

Can we make some efforts to push this into the core code? Personally I really like this script as it can save a lot of time generating a lot of testing data.. Just my 2 cents. Thanks!

I'm not sure I'd like to see this in core - generator scripts are for developers - if we add it to core and someone runs it on their production site it could be a pain to tidy up - unless we write a reliable/safe clean up script at the same time.

If this did land in core - it should only be possible to enable it by hard coding a CFG var - it should always be disabled by default.

The actual generation doesn't need to be in the core but see MDL-16420 - what we need is plugins supporting generating random data. And this should be in the core - simply as part of core activities.
Keep in mind that this adds maintenance overhead for the modules - whenever some logic is updated, random data generation functions may need to be updated.

that makes sense - is there some code around already for this?

I think that anything done here should build upon the same framework that is used to generate data for the PHPunit and Behat tests. That infrastructure is in Moodle core, and the bits specific to each plug-in are in that plugin. For example in mod/quiz/tests/generator/.... What this issue should be about is about exposing a UI to let developers randomly generate lots of stuff for testing. That should be done as a plugin (an admin tool?). Does that plugin go in core (like XMLDB or phpunit) or does it go in contrib (like codechecker)? Well, it does not matter for now. It should be developed in contrib, and it would be great if someone could work on it.

+1 to make it the same effort as mod/*/tests/generator. The UI for the actual generation of the random data should be a contrib plugin, there is no need to make it part of core. I wouldn't even be interested in UI, just a CLI interface, so I can automate it easily.

The framework is there but there is a lot of work for core modules to support it. Most of the modules don't have anything under mod/*/tests/generator and those that do - only support basics, e.g. I can see that quiz module can create new quiz instance but generator can't fill it with random data (random questions and then random answers for user's data).

Well, this will happen with time. For example, Jamie Pratt is just starting some work on the quiz reports, which will involve extneding the generator to be able to generate questions and quiz attempts.

In that case, I think that generator work should be postponed until we have at least few core modules supporting data generation. Unless we get someone interested in the development and willing to push it forward.