Flutter and ChatGPT - Generating Mock Data

Mock data is crucial for testing and development, ensuring that the app functions correctly across various scenarios. For my bar app, I needed comprehensive and realistic data sets for bars in Vienna.

December 23, 2023

As a Flutter developer, I've been exploring various tools to streamline my workflow, and one standout has been ChatGPT. The obvious use case on how to use ChatGPT is to create code.

But today let’s dive into how I leverage ChatGPT, particularly for creating mock data, using a real-world example from my recent project - a bar app focused on Vienna.

The prompt

Please generate mock data for a bar app in Vienna. The data should include the bar's name, description, street address, zip code, city, a URL for an image, and opening hours.

Create the whole dart code including the model class and a listview to show a list of the bars

The Output: The response from ChatGPT was impressively detailed. It provided a list of fictional bars, each with unique names, engaging descriptions, addresses in different Vienna locations, and varied opening hours. This data not only served as a placeholder for backend development but also helped in designing the UI and testing the app’s responsiveness to different data types.

The Code

1. Define the Bar model

First, create a Dart file for your model, say bar.dart, and define the Bar class:

2. Create Mock Data

In another Dart file, like mock_bar_data.dart, create a list of Bar objects:

3. Display Bars in a widget

Create a bar_list.widget and add the following:

Now you can use this wherever you want in your code.

Result

Here are some screenshots of the actual app. Don’t judge me, I only worked an afternoon on this prototype.

Summary

In summary, leveraging ChatGPT for generating mock data in a Flutter app development context not only saves significant time but also enriches the development process by providing creative and diverse data inputs.

In my case, I definitely saved myself hours of time for looking for realistic mock data.

And the best thing? I can always regenerate the result if I’m not too happy.

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