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coding practices - Part 3 (CodeSmith)
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From:
Anand Kumar
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Hi Group,
Today I am covering CodeSmith .
In development phase you need to use some resources from various places on the Web to build finished application , CodeSmith it your best friend to accomplish this requirement. CodeSmith is a template-based code-generation tool that uses a syntax similar to ASP.NET to generate any type of code or text. Unlike many other code-generation tools, CodeSmith does not require you to subscribe to a particular application design or architecture. Using CodeSmith, you can generate anything from a simple, strongly typed collection to an entire application.
When you are building an application, you will often find yourself repeating certain tasks, whether it's writing data access code or building custom collections. CodeSmith is particularly useful at such times because you can write templates to automate those tasks and not only improve your productivity but also automate the tasks that are the most tedious to perform. CodeSmith ships with a number of templates, including ones for all the .NET collection types as well as ones to generate stored procedures, but the real power of this tool comes from being able to create custom templates. To get you started, I'll provide a quick introduction to building a custom template.
Building a Custom Template
CodeSmith templates are simply text files which you can create in any text editor. Their only requirement is that they be saved with the .cst file extension. The sample template that I'm going to build will accept a string and then build a class based on that string. The first step to creating a template is to add the template header, which declares the language of the template, the target language, and a brief description of the template:
<%@ CodeTemplate Language="C#"
TargetLanguage="C#"
Description="Car Template" %>
The next part of the template is the property declarations, where you declare the properties that will be specified each time the template is run. With this template, the single property that I'm going to use is just a string, so the property declaration looks like this:
<%@ Property Name="ClassName" Type="String" Category="Context"
Description="Class Name" %>
This property declaration will make the ClassName property appear in the CodeSmith property window so that it can be specified when the template is run. The next step is to actually build the body of the template, which is very similar to coding with ASP.NET. You can see the body of the template as below
public sealed class <%= ClassName %>
{
private static volatile <%= ClassName %> _instance;
private <%= ClassName %>() {}
private static readonly object _syncRoot = new object();
public static <%= ClassName %> Value
{
get
{
if (_instance == null)
{
lock(_syncRoot)
{
if (_instance == null)
{
_instance = new <%= ClassName %>();
}
}
}
return _instance;
}
}
}
As you can see, the template will take the string input and generate a singleton class using that class name. In the template body, the same opening and closing tags are used as in ASP.NET. In this template, I am simply inserting the property value, but you can also use any type of .NET code inside these tags. Once the template is complete, you load it into CodeSmith by either double-clicking or opening it from the CodeSmith application. Look at the image for view the The template loaded in CodeSmith
You can see that the property on the left is the one I declared in the template. If I enter "SingletonClass" as the class name and click the Generate button, the following code will generate
public sealed class SingletonClass
{
private static volatile SingletonClass _instance;
private SingletonClass() {}
private static readonly object _syncRoot = new object();
public static SingletonClass Value
{
get
{
if (_instance == null)
{
lock(_syncRoot)
{
if (_instance == null)
{
_instance = new SingletonClass();
}
}
}
return _instance;
}
}
}
CodeSmith is relatively easy to use and can produce some incredible results if applied correctly. One of the most common sections of an application that is targeted for code generation is the data access layer. CodeSmith includes a special assembly called the SchemaExplorer which can be used to generate templates from tables, stored procedures, or almost any other SQL Server object. CodeSmith was written by Eric J. Smith and is available for download at http://www.ericjsmith.net/codesmith.
Cheers
Anand
http://spaces.msn.com/members/anandkumar
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