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Blueprint: Data Seeding & Simulation

This guide explains how to populate Ticket Masala with initial data, synthetic customers, and mock tickets for development and testing.

The Seeding Doctrine

Ticket Masala uses a JSON-based Seeding Engine to ensure that all developers start with a consistent environment.

  • Role-Awareness: Seeds Admins, Employees, and Customers with their respective identity roles.
  • Domain-Awareness: Links seeded items to valid DomainIds defined in the YAML configuration.
  • Repeatable State: Seeding is idempotent—it only runs if the database is detected as empty at startup.

Seed Structure (seed_data.json)

{
  "Admins": [
    { "Email": "admin@ticketmasala.com", "Name": "System Admin" }
  ],
  "Employees": [
    { "Email": "agent1@ticketmasala.com", "Roles": ["Admin", "Support"] }
  ],
  "WorkContainers": [
    { "Name": "Global IT Support", "DomainId": "IT" }
  ]
}

Synthetic Data Generation (Bogus)

For large-scale testing (1,000+ items), we use the Bogus library during the seeding phase.

  • Realistic Distributions: 80% Routine, 15% Normal, 5% Urgent.
  • Domain Specialization: Generates "Tax Audit" descriptions for the Tax domain and "Irrigation Issue" for Gardening.
  • Historical Back-Dating: Creates data with timestamps across the last 12 months to test analytics and trends.

Execution

  1. Manual Trigger: Delete masala.db and restart the application. The DbSeeder will detect the missing DB and re-populate from JSON.
  2. Environment Override: You can point to a special "load-test" seeding file via MASALA_SEED_PATH.

Success Criteria

  1. Zero Drift: All developers see the same initial state.
  2. Role Coverage: Every security role has at least one functional test user.
  3. Speed: Seed 1,000 items in <2 seconds.

References