Even though Armin and Gustavo, in their articles for the previous edition of GXNews (“
Data Providers and Business Components to initialize data” and “
It was just like Karina told me 20 years ago”, respectively) explained how to initialize data using Data Providers and Business Components, they didn’t mention that in many cases, now we won't have to manually write Data Providers if we use the Data Provider Generator.
The idea behind the Data Provider Generator, as indicated by its name, is the automatic generation of Data Providers by taking data sets from different sources.
In this first release of the Data Provider Generator,
FreeBase is the only data source from which it can be fed.
FreeBase is a structured data repository (a sort of Wikipedia, only that it contains data), according to its own introduction: ‘Freebase is an open, shared database of the world's knowledge’. In it we can find information about countries, world currencies, car makes, units of measurement and a lot more.
Therefore, following on with the topic explained in the articles mentioned above, a good way to run the processes of initial data loading when implementing a system is to use Data Providers and Business Components, but since GeneXus keeps evolving, in many cases now I won't even have to manually write the Data Provider, GeneXus will do it for me.
Watch the video below which shows how to load the countries sample used the documentation (in spanish).