Getting Started

This documentation describes the concepts and techniques necessary for a technical professional to access and install the Ed-Fi Sample Data Generator.

Audience

This documentation is for technical professionals who work with education-data systems, primarily software developers, system integrators, and technical data analysts. Depending on needs and use cases for sample data, below are the two groups of intended users:

• Technical Data Analysts. The Sample Data Generator can be run "as-is" as a utility using the command line. To effectively generate sample data, analysts should be comfortable with the Ed-Fi Data Standard, editing XML configuration files, and working with Ed-Fi bulk XML data.
• Software Developers. Custom use cases and data model extensions will require modification of the Sample Data Generator application code. This will require the analyst knowledge above plus proficiency with Microsoft Visual Studio and C#. 

Prerequisites

To gain the most benefit from this information, the reader should be familiar with the following information:

• Ed-Fi technology, see www.ed-fi.org.
• The Sample Data Generator can target multiple versions of the Ed-Fi Data Standard. Readers should be familiar with the documentation for the Ed-Fi Data Standard v2.0, Ed-Fi Data Standard v2.2 or Ed-Fi Data Standard v3.0 depending on the output version desired. Refer to the Ed-Fi Technical Suite Compatibility Matrix to understand the Ed-Fi Data Standard version associated with a specific Ed-Fi product.