Fixed count of usernames either random or fixed list

#1

First, mockaroo is a bucket of awesome, great job.

Need to simulate work on a help desk. Need to randomly pick from a list of user names of 5 to 20 different values. Username is good for simulating different users coming into the system, but in this case need to simulate the much smaller list of people who are helping the end users and it needs to be the same set of of help desk users over and over again. So maybe a list of “Ed”, “Suzie”, “Chuck”, “Bill”, and “Joe” are the help desk people. All 10,000 records need to have those values randomly dispersed as the person who resolved the help desk request.

Long term capability, maybe if we could specify the max value on username? If the max value is equal to the number of records, then every record would have a different value. If the max value is less than the number of records, then reuse would kick in and just random pick from what has already been generated to get to the record count. In the example above, if I set the max value to 5, then keep reusing those 5 over and over again randomly???

In the short term, is there a way to randomly pick from an array of those five values? If this has already been asked and I missed the post, sorry.

#2

Yes, you can use the Custom List datatype to randomly pick values from a list. For larger lists you can use the Datasets feature which allows you to upload your own datasets as csv and randomly pull from them in your schemas. You can even generate your users table using Mockaroo and then upload it back into Mockaroo as a dataset so you can reference it in other schemas using the “Dataset Column” type. This is generally how you enforce relational integrity using Mockaroo.