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Developer Tools

Spinning up realistic data by hand — a preset, then an item with every field filled in — gets old fast when you're testing layout or a new field editor. Collectary ships two conveniences that exist only in Debug builds. A Release build (what your users run) never sees either of them, so there's nothing to hide or feature-flag away before shipping.

The "Developer (all fields)" template

Create a collection the usual way — New collection → From template — and you'll find a Developer category at the bottom of the picker with a single entry, Developer (all fields). Pick it and you get a preset that contains:

  • one of every field type Collectary knows about — text, numbers, dates, choices, ratings, colours, images, audio, barcodes, the lot;
  • a configured list with a few sub-fields, so you can exercise nested entry editing;
  • a field group ("Specifications") holding a couple of fields, so grouped layout is covered too.

It's the fastest way to see how a change to the item editor, a new field editor, or a theme tweak behaves against the full spread of field types in one screen.

The template lives in DeveloperTemplate.cs and the whole class is wrapped in #if DEBUG. Templates are discovered by reflection (see Adding a field type for how the catalog works), so a class that doesn't compile in Release simply isn't there — the Developer category disappears with it.

"Fill random" in the item editor

Open any collection, add an item, and in a Debug build you'll see a Fill random button next to Save and Cancel. One click drops believable random data — courtesy of Bogus — into every field on the form. Review it, tweak what you like, and Save.

The randomisation is per-field: every field editor decides how to fill itself (a Randomize method it overrides), so adding a new field type automatically slots in here too — no central switch to update.

A few field types are deliberately left empty, because filling them would mean writing throwaway files to disk or inventing references that don't exist:

  • Image, Multi-image, Audio, File attachment — these point at real blobs in the image/file store, so there's nothing sensible to fabricate; add a file by hand if you need one.
  • Linked item — it references another real item, which a random value can't conjure.
  • Colour — left untouched as well; pick a colour manually.

Everything else — including each entry of a list — gets filled. The button only changes the open form; nothing is saved until you hit Save, exactly as if you'd typed it all in yourself.