TextTemplating

Goal

This project's goal is to bring the old T4 text templating and Razor code generating approach to the new ASP.NET 5 projects.

Update

The Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 now supports to process *.tt files in desing time, but this repo is maybe still useful who wants to process T4 templates in a dnx project outside visual studio (eg. in Mac with Visual Studio Code)

How to use

As a command line tool

Add the following to your project.json.

{
    "dependencies": {
        "TextTemplating": "1.0.0-rc1-final"
    },
    "commands": {
        "tt": "TextTemplating"
    }
}

Now you can use the tt command as a command line tool to transform templates at design-time, with the specified command line arguments

--t4-template or -t4 flag: Enable to process t4 template files (*.tt) and generate outputs.
--razor or -r flag: Enable to process razor files (*.cshtml) and generate outputs.
--preprocess or -p flag: If you use this with -t4 flag the output will be a runtime text template.
--dir or -d optional single value argument: Specify the working directory. The default is the project's root folder, and the processing is recursive in the current working directory.

Example:

dnx tt --t4-template --razor --dir ./Templates

As a design time tool

You can also bring the old CTRL + S behavior for the template files with Gulp, so you can generate code immediately if you save the file.

Add the following commands to the project.json:

{
    "dependencies": {
        "TextTemplating": "1.0.0-rc1-final"
    },
    "commands": {
        "t4": "TextTemplating --t4-template --dir ./Templates",
        "razor": "TextTemplating --razor --dir ./Templates"
    }
}

Add the following packages to the project's Node package manager config file. (package.json)

"dateformat": "~1.0.11",
"gulp": "~3.9.0",
"gulp-dnx": "git+https://github.com/totht91/gulp-dnx.git#dev"

With the gulp-dnx you can execute a dnx command as a gulp task, so we can create gulp.watch tasks for the template files. This is also my forked repo what can you find there: https://github.com/totht91/gulp-dnx

Add the following to the project's gulpfile.js:

/// <binding ProjectOpened='default' />

var gulp = require('gulp');
dnx = require("gulp-dnx");

gulp.task('default', ['watch']);

var options = {
    restore: false
};

gulp.task('t4', dnx('t4', options));
gulp.task('razor', dnx('razor', options));

gulp.task('watch', function (cb) {
    gulp.watch('./Templates/*.tt', ['t4']);
    gulp.watch('./Templates/*.cshtml', ['razor']);
});

After that the template files will be automatically processed in save. (also in visual studio)

As a library

To transform templates at runtime, you can also use the Engine class.

Sample is work in progres

As a service

Work in progres

License

MIT

EdsonF / TextTemplating