T4 Toolbox. Design-Time Code Generation by using T4 Text Templates. Design-time T4 text templates let you to generate program code and other files in your Visual Studio project. Typically, you write the templates so that they vary the code that they generate according to data from a model. A model is a file or database that contains key information about your application’s requirements.
For example, you could have a model that defines a workflow, either as a table or a diagram. From the model, you can generate the software that executes the workflow. When your users’ requirements change, it is easy to discuss the new workflow with the users. You are probably already familiar with code generation. A text template contains a mixture of the text that you want to generate, and program code that generates variable parts of the text.
To create a design-time T4 template in Visual Studio Create a Visual Studio project, or open an existing one. A template will be executed, generating the subsidiary file, in any of the following cases: To debug a text template: CodeType Interface (EnvDTE) Code Generation and T4 Text Templates. In Visual Studio, a T4 text template is a mixture of text blocks and control logic that can generate a text file. The control logic is written as fragments of program code in Visual C# or Visual Basic. The generated file can be text of any kind, such as a Web page, or a resource file, or program source code in any language. There are two kinds of T4 text templates: Run time T4 text templates ('preprocessed' templates) are executed in your application to produce text strings, typically as part of its output.
For example, you could create a template to define an HTML page: <html><body> The date and time now is: <#= DateTime.Now #></body></html> Notice that the template resembles the generated output. In addition, the template contains fragments of program code. To generate the output, your application calls a function that is generated by the template. String webResponseText = new MyTemplate().TransformText(); Your application can run on a computer that does not have Visual Studio installed. T4 Tutorial: Creating reusable code generation templates. This post is a part of the series that introduces code generation with Text Templates (also known as T4 Templates) in Visual Studio using C# and Visual Basic; explains how to create reusable templates and combine them in complex code generators. In order to follow examples in this article, you need to have Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 Standard Edition or higher, SQL Server 2005 or later, T4 Toolbox and T4 Editor installed on your computer.
Introduction In the first article of this series, we created the following text template to generate a DELETE stored procedure for a given database table using SMO. This stored procedure is one of the CRUD procedures that would need to be created to encapsulate access to this table. Accessing data exclusively through CRUD stored procedures helps to eliminate SQL injection vulnerabilities, prevent accidental data corruption during casual browsing and may help to improve performance of SQL queries.
Visual Basic Create a new code generation template Conclusion. T4 Template Tutorials.