I needed a way to take a blank sharepoint and populate it full of useful data. This is useful for people who are integrating with sharepoint and want to develop some sort of connector but want to have something that is less happy-path than a blank sharepoint.

Automate the creation of test sites, subsites, sharepoint site groups, document libraries with uploaded files

The powershell script https://github.com/nddipiazza/SharepointLoadGenerator/blob/master/sharepoint-load-test-data-generator.ps1 creates sites, sub-sites and document libraries, and then is capable of uploading folders from your file system into document libraries.

You supply a Document Library Root which is a directory with folders for each Document library. For example, if you supply:

Document Library Root (example: C:\testfiles)
  - DocFolder1 (example: C:\testfiles\DocFolder1)
  - DocFolder2
  - DocFolder3

The script will also create some sharepoint groups in each site.

So to use this, you save this ps1 script to your sharepoint box, edit the number of host, name prefixes, number of sites you want to create, number of sub-sites you want to create, and number of document libraries and the location of Document Library Root on your local file system. Then you run the script and it will slowly create a very rich set of useful test data in sharepoint.

Note the docLibFileDumpFolder is the result of Step 1 and it must have at least (numSites * numSubSites * numDocumentLIbraries) folders in it. The tool will add each document library one folder at a time in that directory.

Save the powershell script from this git repository sharepoint-load-test-data-generator.ps1 and save it to the Sharepoint server. Edit the file and change the properties at the top to match your preferences.

$sharepointHost = Your sharepoint hostname
$siteNamePrefix = The prefix it should give all of your sites. They will be testsiteprefix1, testsiteprefix2, etc.
$subsiteNamePrefix = The prefix it should give all of your sub-sites. They will be testsubsiteprefix1, testsubsiteprefix2, etc.
$siteGroupNamePrefix = The site group name prefix to give all sharepoint site groups created.
$documentLibraryNamePrefix = The document library prefix given to all sharepoint document libraries creatd.
$docLibFileDumpFolder = The folder containing the output of step 1 above.
$numSites = The number of sites to create.
$numSubSites = The number of sub-sites to create in each site.
$numDocumentLibraies = The number of document libraries to create in each site and sub-site.
$numSharepointSiteGroupsToCreate = The number of sharepoint site groups to create in each site. 

Optional step: Generate useful test data

If you don't have a bunch of test files already, there is a Visual Studio project created by Microsoft that can load a Wikipedia backup and can create PPT, DOC, HTML, Excel files from wikipedia content so that they have real content and images too.

Get the project from here: https://spbulkdocumentimport.codeplex.com/

You will need this downloaded and extracted to use this: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

How to build the Bulk Loader visual studio project:

Download this Visual Studio Project: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Bulk-Loader-Create-Unique-eeb2d084

It is an app called "Bulk loader" – this will create a directory full of media files created using the actual Wikipedia content.

Download / install / launch Visual Studio 2015 community version https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=5124 install this as well

Make sure you have .NET framework 4 installed.

Open the .sln "Bulk Loader - Create Unique Documents based on Wikipedia Dump File\C#\BulkLoader.sln" file in visual studio

In Visual Studio, open the .sln file for BulkLoader

Go to Properties → Signing → Uncheck the clickonce signing.

Make sure Open XML SDK and log4net DLL references are added:

• Install Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=5124

• Download Apache log4net-1.2.15 http://archive.apache.org/dist/logging/log4net/binaries/log4net-1.2.15-bin-newkey.zip

On each project, add references to log4net and openxml DLLs.

Build the project, which will generate 4 project’s executables:

• BulkLoader.Processor.Console
• BulkLoader.Streamer.Console
• BulkLoader.Controller.Console
• BulkLoader.Monitor.Console

How to run it:

See video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2vX2kfK0mQ