Stakeholders tend to be more involved in the review of a prototype if they see real data on it. With real data the hidden and forgotten requirements in the functional analysis raise clearly and quite soon. Sadly the effort required to fill a prototype with real data is too high and often it's filled with dummy data instead.
Justinmind Prototyper allows you to populate the data masters (and by extent data grids and simulated queries) with data kind of data base. So that your prototypes can be filled with plenty of records coming from an already existing data base.
To do so just open any of your data masters using the option 'edit' in the contextual menu of a data master. Then select the 'View and edit records' tab.
Press the 'Import' button and a dialog will appear asking you to select a csv file:
The only requirement to that file is that it must have a first row with texts that match the names of the attributes in the data master (the order of the columns doesn't matter).
You can select which character is used in your csv file to separate the values.
Finally you can either replace the current records in the data master by the ones in the file or add the ones in the file to the already existing ones in the data master.
You can also export all the records in a data master to a csv file in order to import them in other prototypes.
Please
note that you can fill a drop down or a selection list with the
values in a data master. The import from csv comes in handy when you
combine both options to have, for instance, a drop down that displays
all the countries in the world. That drop down could use a data
master 'country' with just an attribute and you can download a full
list of countries in a csv or excel file and fill it with that file.
A prerequiste to import records is that you need a data master where all the imported records could be added, however, the application has another option to entirely create a new data master from a CSV file.
You can find this option in the File > Import menu and also in the data masters panel. Click any of these options and the next dialog will appear:
The dialog asks you for the name of the data master and the CSV file with the data that will be used to create the attributes and the records of the new data master.
The CSV file must have a first row with the name of the
data master attributes, like in the import records operation. The remaining rows will
be used to initialize the records of the new data master.
Note: all attributes created will be of text type.