String Generator

If you've ever had to do boundary testing, you probably did what my co-workers and I used to do. You need a 400 character string, so you open MS Word, hold down the 'x' key for a few seconds, and then use the word count feature to see how many characters you've got. If you've got too many, you delete some. If you don't have enough, you mash 'x' for a few more seconds. Later, rinse and repeat until you've got it right.

Some folks would even remember to save those word files for future use, but more often than not we closed them without thinking about it. (This was usually followed by the comment "Ah, crap, I shoulda saved that...")

To help take some of the sting out of this, I wrote a string generator application. It lets users generate strings of predefined lengths, and then automatically puts those strings on the clipboard so that they can be pasted into fields.

I wanted an easy way to know that a field could accept that number of characters, so I always had the string end with a capital Z. For example, if you needed a 10 character string, it would generate aaaaaaaaaZ. Then you'd paste that into the desired field, and if you didn't see the 'Z', you knew the field was truncating the data that was entered.

The app I wrote looked like this:












Each of the buttons you see on the left would automatically generate a string of the specified length. If you needed a string of a different length, you could enter that length in the box next to the custom button.

The string generation itself was handled by this code:

private string prgGenerateString(int intLen)
 {
  StringBuilder MyStringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
  MyStringBuilder.Capacity = intLen;
  for (int i = 1;i<intlen;i++)
  {
      MyStringBuilder.Append("a");
  }
  MyStringBuilder.Append("Z");
  return MyStringBuilder.ToString();
 }

private void prgGenerateStatusMessage(int intLen)
 {
  lblStatus.Text = intLen.ToString() + " character string placed on clipboard.";
 }

private void prgCreateStringAndPost(int intLen)
 {
  try
  {
   string txtValue = prgGenerateString(intLen);
   txtPreview.Text = txtValue;
   prgGenerateStatusMessage(intLen);
   Clipboard.SetDataObject(txtValue);
  }
  catch(Exception except)
  {
   lblStatus.Text = except.Message;
  }   
 }

Each button on the form had code like this:

  private void cmd129_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
  {
      prgCreateStringAndPost(129);
  }     

And here's the code for the custom button:

  private void cmdCustom_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
  {
      if (txtCustomLength.Text != "")
      {
          try
          {
              int val = Convert.ToInt32(txtCustomLength.Text);
              prgCreateStringAndPost(val);
          }

          catch (Exception except)
          {
              lblStatus.Text = except.Message;
          }
      }

      else
          MessageBox.Show("Please enter a value in the box next to the Custom button");
  }

Feel free to take this code and build your own string generator. (If the source code got truncated in the post, just go to View Source in your browser and you can copy and paste from there)

Enjoy!