Boise Code Camp 2011 Presentation Notes

Sorry I’m late getting this up. I will give usual excuses of being busy.

Since I developed this talk on this blog, this entry will essentially be a link list. I put a copy of the slides in Google doc and you can reference it here

Template Parts

I presented a slide that showed the basic template parts in a small mock template:

<#@ template language="C#" #>
<#@ directive property=“value” #>
<# var item = "Statement Block"; #>
Text Block 
<#= "Expression Block" #>
<#+ 
    string ClassFeatureBlock(string thingy)
    {
        return thingy;
    } 
#>

Hello World Monty

I showed some of the elementary features of T4 templates by refactoring a basic template that would create a text file that contained the infamous words “Hello World”. A script of that exercise is here

Basic Code Generation Demonstration

To demonstrate Code Generation I set out to generate a simple T-SQL Select Statement using Sql Management Objects (SMO).

The Target Code looked something like this:

Include (SelectSpInclude.tt)

<#@ import namespace="Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextTemplating" #>
<#@ assembly name="Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo" #>
<#@ assembly name="Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo" #>
<#@ import namespace="Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo" #>
<#+
    public class SelectSpInclude: TextTransformation
    {
        public string ServerName;
        public string DbName;
        public string TableName;

        public override string TransformText()
        {
 
        Table table = getTable(ServerName, DbName, TableName);
#>
SELECT <#+ bool forgetComma = true;
 foreach (Column col in table.Columns)
{ #><#+if (!forgetComma) Write("      ,");#>[<#= col.Name #>]
<#+ forgetComma = false;
} #>
FROM <#= table.Name #><#+

        return this.GenerationEnvironment.ToString();
    } 
    Table getTable(string serverName, string dbName, string tableName)
    {
        Server server = new Server(serverName);
        Database database = new Database(server, dbName);
        Table table = new Table(database, tableName);
        table.Refresh();
        return table; 
    }
}
#>

Template (EmployeesSp.tt)

<#@ template language="C#v3.5" #>
<#@ output extension="sql" #>
<#@ include file="SelectSpInclude.tt" #>
<#
    SelectSpInclude gen = new SelectSpInclude();
    gen.ServerName = @"localhost\SQLEXPRESS";
    gen.DbName = "Northwind";
    gen.TableName = "Employees"; Write(gen.TransformText());
#>

Result (EmployeesSp.sql)

SELECT [EmployeeID]
      ,[LastName]
      ,[FirstName]
      ,[Title]
      ,[TitleOfCourtesy]
      ,[BirthDate]
      ,[HireDate]
      ,[Address]
      ,[City]
      ,[Region]
      ,[PostalCode]
      ,[Country]
      ,[HomePhone]
      ,[Extension]
      ,[Photo]
      ,[Notes]
      ,[ReportsTo]
      ,[PhotoPath]
FROM Employees

Somewhere in this part of the presentation, someone asked if it is possible to generate a series of files from a single template, a separate code file for each table in a database. Oleg Sych has a blog post that does just that here

Generating a Nullable ADO.NET DataSet Wrapper

This is when I went to Show and Tell Mode. I demonstrate a Nullable DataSet Wrapper that I wrote in these blog entries. I wrote the templates in VB.NET to generate code in C#.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Part 4