How to populate sitecore with test data using powershell

Sometimes you need to generate test data, for instance, to check the performance of a solution. In Sitecore you can do that in different ways: you can create items by hand, which is obviously the worst option, you can write a piece of code that will create items for you, and you can also use the Sitecore PowerShell.

The following script creates 10,000 test items in a loop, sets the name, price and category for each of them. Also at the end, it displays the total run time.

cd master:\\content\home\products
$categories = @{$true="{050E9CAE-F55F-4DF1-8001-07CD4D70FC09}";$false="{8C11E41B-0CE5-4602-BB6D-5DE5B4356D25}"}

$stopwatch = new-object -type 'System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch'
$stopwatch.Start()

for($i = 1; $i -le 10000; $i++)
{
    $newProduct = new-item "product_$i" -type 'sample\product'
    
    set-itemproperty $newProduct.Paths.Path -name "Name" -value "Product $i"
    set-itemproperty $newProduct.Paths.Path -name "Price" -value $i
    set-itemproperty $newProduct.Paths.Path -name "Category" -value $categories[$i % 2 -eq 1]
}

$stopwatch.Stop()
write-host $stopwatch.Elapsed

Performance

On my test virtual machine, for 10,000 items, the script executes from about an hour to one and a half hours. It is quite a lot of time if you want to insert a million products. That is why I introduced two optimisations. Here they are:

cd master:\\content\home\products

$categories = @{$true="{050E9CAE-F55F-4DF1-8001-07CD4D70FC09}";$false="{8C11E41B-0CE5-4602-BB6D-5DE5B4356D25}"}

$stopwatch = new-object -type 'System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch'
$stopwatch.Start()

$bulkupdate = new-object -type "Sitecore.Data.BulkUpdateContext"

for($i = 1; $i -le 10000; $i++)
{
    $newProduct = new-item "product_$i" -type 'sample\product'
    
    $newProduct.Editing.BeginEdit();
    $newProduct["Name"] = "Product $i";
    $newProduct["Price"] = $i;
    $newProduct["Category"] = $categories[$i % 2 -eq 1] ;
    $newProduct.Editing.EndEdit() | out-null
}

if($bulkupdate -ne $null)
{
    $bulkupdate.Dispose();
}

$stopwatch.Stop()
write-host $stopwatch.Elapsed

The use of the BulkUpdateContext forces Sitecore to not update index immediately after every save, but to do it later.

By avoiding the use of cmdlet Set-Property for the direct Sitecore API calls, we managed to reduce the number of BeginEdit() and EndEdit() method calls three times, because Set-Property internally calls these methods every time.

Thanks to these optimisations I was able to reduce the time of inserting 10,000 items to about 25 minutes.

If you are using PowerShell that is included in Sitecore Rocks, these optimisations will not work. This PowerShell is not running in an application context, so you need to use cmdlets.