The T4 engine that ships with the DSL tools gives you a flexible way to generate text output based on the contents of a model by running a custom tool against a template.

However, in a production environment, you may not want a user of your designer to have access to the template. You might prefer the user experience to be more like that provided by the Microsoft dataset generator, where the custom tool runs directly against the model file, rather than against a template.

This is very easy to do using the May release of the DSL tools.

1) Create and test your template as normal, but then put in a placeholder in the directive where the name of the model would usually go e.g. ??MODELFILENAME%??

2) Create a new class that inherits from TemplatedCodeGenerator. You can make life easier for yourself by including the following import statements:

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextTemplating.VSHost;

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.EnterpriseTools.Shell;

using System.IO;

3) Add a new Guid custom attribute to the class e.g.

Thanks Stuart.

The ability to run templates from code, to run templates against specified elements, and to generate multiple output files would all be very useful.

It would also be useful if the "designer code generation" functionality could be tied into the existing "Transform All Templates" control on the Solution Explorer to give the user a simple way to regenerate all code related to a model, whether it is in a template file in the project or controlled by the designer.

The ability to re-generate all output relating to a model automatically is an important part of moving to automated builds, and is one of the advantages of T4 over the previous document generation technology in the DSL tools. The usefulness of code-generation from within a designer would be reduced unless it could also be accessed as part of an automated build.

Duncan

Hi to all.

1) In this scenario often I work creating a new designer file by the "Add new item" option obtained by right click on solution window.

But for each new file, I have to set the "custom Tool Property" by hand with the name of my own custom tool. Is there the possibility to do this automatically?

2)As wrote in this thread, in my designer I can generate several file from the same source model; I overwrote the GenerateCode Method.

Under the model file, in solution explorer appears the generated file. But it is the file created thanks to this instruction in GeneratedCode method

data = base.GenerateCode(inputFileName, inputFileContent);
return data;

How can I add the others generated files under the model file?
Is this possible?

Thanx for your help

Paolo