Auto Generate monday.com App
One of our clients provides consulting services on the monday.com platform to other businesses. They regularly experiment with different board structures to optimize various processes for their customers using monday.com. Before implementing these processes inside organizations, they do multiple demos of their solutions and collect feedback for iterative improvements.
To get a feeling of how the boards should function and provide meaningful and high-quality demos, they must populate the boards with fake data that closely resembles the real one. Doing this monotonous low-skill work manually every time is super time-consuming. They asked us if we could figure out how to automate this process as much as possible.
Discovery
During the discovery call, we talked with their team, discussed app requirements, and ensured we were on the same page. Automatically generating data on boards with complex structures is not that straightforward. We decided to cover only simple scenarios that account for 99% of use cases.
The app would generate items in every board group separately. It should support the most frequently used column types:
- Text
- Number
- Date
- Timeline
- Status
- Dropdown
- Label
- Tags
Other column types aren’t used that often to justify automating them from the start. In the future, we can easily add support for those if needed.
For every column type, the app should provide some customization to narrow down the inserted values according to the domain meaning of each column on a board. For example, users might want to fill text columns with names, countries, cities, etc.
The app performance is pretty important too. Sometimes, the client generates thousands of records to simulate complex boards and test their usability in close-to-read-world situations with various integrations and reports.
Solution
To keep things simple, we’ve developed a front-end only monday.com app that provides a custom board view. The UI is pretty straightforward - enter the number of items you want, target group, and customize settings for every supported column on a board. After clicking the generate button, the app would show a progress bar indicating how many items were inserted and the overall progress.
Depending on the column type, there are multiple customization options available:
- Selection of possible values for Status, Dropdown, Label, and Tags columns
- Range customization for Number, Date, and Timeline columns
- Random lorem ipsum or specialized value sets like Countries, Companies, Cities, etc. for Text and Item name columns
The app is capable of generating hundreds of items per minute. Its performance is limited only by the monday.com API.
Results
Our client gained the ability to generate mock items on their boards as needed quickly with minimal human input. The development already paid off with hundreds of hours saved on doing it manually. They regularly use the app to prepare for demos and experiment with different board structures and integration apps.
We also frequently use this app with the client’s permission to generate mock data for testing our other monday.com apps. Not only does it allow mimicking our clients’ actual boards, but we can also insert extreme amounts of data quickly to create huge boards for testing apps in edge cases.
Even a relatively simple monday.com app like this can be this valuable.
Our client is happy, and we’re building other awesome projects together.
