JFixtures creation is inspired by Ruby On Rails fixtures - it helps to define test data in a human readable YML format and then to transform the data to the SQL language which your database understands. So it is a sort of YML to SQL converter. As for java world, JFixtures could be compared with DBUnit library.

Please read our WIKI for more info

• With plain SQL it is hard to match values to column names even when you format SQL well:

INSERT 
  INTO users(id, first_name, last_name, middle_name, sex, age, is_admin, is_guest) 
  VALUES (5, 'Vladimir', 'Korobkov', 'Vadimovich', 'm', 29, true, false); 

With JFixtures it is easier:

user_1:
  id: 5
  first_name: Vladimir
  last_name: Korobkov
  middle_name: Vadimovich
  sex: m
  age: 29
  is_admin: true
  is_guest: false

or the compact form:

vlad: { first_name: 'Vladimir', last_name: 'Korobkov', sex: 'm', age: 29 }
homer: { first_name: 'Homer', last_name: 'Griffin', sex: 'm', age: 45 }

• References to other tables are numbers in plain SQL:

INSERT INTO comment(id, ticket_id, user_id, text) VALUES (1, 4, 8, 'Hello, world');

Numbers are hard to remember and to manage, they do not bring any associated and readable information. Like foreign key 4 says nothing about what is in the referred row of user table.

JFixtures allows to define your own text alias for every row and then to refer tables by aliases:

good_comment: # This is the alias for the row below
  text: This service is really great
  rate: 10
  ticket_id: write_wiki_ticket # refers to tickets table by write_wiki_ticket alias
  user_id: vlad_admin # refers to users table by vlad_admin alias

• Since every row of every table has an alias, JFixtures takes care of automatic primary keys generation so no need to deal with these numbers at in 99% of cases. For the remaining 1% there is an ability to define primary keys values manually.

• JFixtures resolves references to foreign tables by aliases instead of foreign key numeric values

• JFixtures takes care of the tables order, finding the dependencies between tables and aligning the dependent tables first. For example, if table comments has foreign keys to tables users and tickets, then users/tickets go first in the result SQL to satisfy comments.

• JFixtures provides a nice file system structure to break data into files:

  permissions.yml   # converts to "permissions" table
  addresses.yml     # converts to "addresses" table
- geo/ 
    coordinates.yml # converts to "geo.addresses" table
    locations.yml   # converts to "geo.locations" table
- chat/
    comments.yml    # converts to "chat.comments" table
    rooms.yml       # converts to "chat.rooms" table
  - customer/
      rooms.yml     # converts to "chat.customer.rooms" table
      costs.yml     # converts to "chat.customer.costs" table

• JFixtures has circular dependencies detection between tables

The project is written in pure Java and needs Java Runtime 8+. It is available on maven central as a library or there is a command line interface for it

JFixtures support a few database dialects:

• SQL 99 which covers many databases(Postgres, Oracle, H2, SqlLite, Yandex ClickHouse, Sybase and many others)
• MySql
• Miscrosoft Sql
• Adding a custom database support is easy or submit us an issue

JFixtures can export the result into XML, so it is possible then to transform the XML into any other custom format, either SQL or not

By the moment JFixtures has only one compile time dependency - org.yaml:snakeyaml:jar for parsing source YML files.

We are happy if you contribute or submit an issue

Also, feel free to email us, the emails are in pom.xml

And join us on slack

Please read our WIKI for more info