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I’m hoping to use Sanity as an earlier part of our design and prototyping workflow. Are there any techniques or plugins folks would recommend to – 1. Create Sanity schemas...

7 replies
Last updated: Dec 15, 2020
I’m hoping to use Sanity as an earlier part of our design and prototyping workflow.
Are there any techniques or plugins folks would recommend to –

1. Create Sanity schemas via a GUI?
2. Populate a Sanity instance with example content based on the schema (similar to using Faker.js directives)?
Wish #1 would definitely be helpful in some circumstances, although not critical.

Wish #2 would be vital to exemplify a model, to better design against it.

How are others faking or mocking realistic dummy data in Sanity?
Dec 12, 2020, 6:47 PM
user Y
is pre-populating a Sanity database with mock content something you’ve run into before (e.g. to support a content-first design/dev process)?
Dec 13, 2020, 5:47 PM
Hey there! 🙂
As far as I know there does not exist a GUI tool for creating schemas. That would be lovely though! So if you find one let me know
😄
In regards to 2: Faker.js looks very unassuming on what you do with it. So I picture you can easily make a node script that creates objects for your schema with Faker.js data and either saves it to an 
ndjson
file that you later can import into Sanity via the CLI or directly by using the JS client so you don't have to temporaily store the data on local disk.
Dec 14, 2020, 7:34 AM
☝️ Right on!
I'd also add that when I worked with Sanity back in the agency days, we also strived to get real project content in as early as possible (we actually pretty much banned 
lorem ipsum
 because real content always brings surprises).

user S
has made a schema generator that takes you one step closer to that GUI experience. https://sanity-schema.simeongriggs.dev/ You could also check out the Sanity Snippets for VS Code if you want to make'em quicker.
Dec 14, 2020, 7:41 AM
☝️ Right on!
I'd also add that when I worked with Sanity back in the agency days, we also strived to get real project content in as early as possible (we actually pretty much banned 
lorem ipsum
 because real content always brings surprises).

user S
has made a schema generator that takes you one step closer to that GUI experience. https://sanity-schema.simeongriggs.dev/ You could also check out the Sanity Snippets for VS Code if you want to make'em quicker.
Dec 14, 2020, 7:41 AM
user A
user Y
Thanks!
Using Faker to emulate realistic content would be great.


I picture you can easily make a node script that creates objects for your schema with Faker.js data and either saves it to an 
ndjson
 file that you later can import into Sanity via the CLI  or directly by using the JS client
Are there any analogous code samples you code point me for sorting out how to build a pipeline like this 👆?
Dec 14, 2020, 4:32 PM
Say you want to generate 10 000 random users. I imagine the Faker.js script can look something like this:

// file: generate_data.js
const faker = require("faker");

const noUsersToGenerate = 10000; // 10 000

for (let i = 0; i < noUsersToGenerate; i++) {
  const newUser = {
    _id: faker.random.uuid(),
    _type: "user",
    name: faker.name.findName(),
    email: faker.internet.email(),
  };

  console.log(JSON.stringify(newUser));
}
Which will output 
ndjson
directly that you can re-route to a file:

$ node generate_data.js > my_fake_data.ndjson
Which you can then import to Sanity with the CLI:


$ sanity dataset import my_fake_data.ndjson name-of-my-dataset
I'm sure you can do this a lot of fancy ways where the generate script'll parse your Sanity schema so you don't have to write it manually. But it doesn't have to be more complex than this to get you started I think
🙂
Hope it helps! Please share in
i-made-this if you make something cool 😄
Dec 15, 2020, 7:40 AM
Thanks so much Benedicte. 🙌
I’ll play with this to see what results I can possibly build out.
Dec 15, 2020, 12:16 PM

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