Look at T4 Templates In Visual Studio 2015 - Part One

Sateesh Arveti
Apr 29, 2016
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In this article, we will look into T4 templates and how they are helpful in code/documents generation. We can create templates and generate code/text based on it without need of searching and replacing text in it. T4 templates are used to generate boiler-plate code by MVC, Entity framework. We can create two types of templates:

Text template [Design time]: used to generate code to be used at design time by other classes and can interact with model designers.

Runtime Text Template [preprocessed]: used to generate and execute it via code, support passing parameters and can execute outside of Visual Studio.

Let’s create a sample console application in Visual Studio 2015 and understand it:

console

Click on Add new item in Solution Explorer and select Text template as shown below, which will add .tt file to our project:

add

code
Let’s add below code and run it:

Here, I used T4 output directive (<#@ directivename attribute=”value” #>) that will give instructions to template engine to generate output file with .txt extension and should be first elements in the template.

We can use import directive to use a specific assembly in the template without fully qualified name, assembly directive for using it in the template and template directive to set attributes like debug flag to enable/disable template debugging, language flag [C# or VB] and inherits attribute to set base class for generated class.

We can add an expression block (<#= Expression #>) to compute an expression and return result within a text block (here, output is current Datetime).

We can save template or click on Run Custom Tool to execute the it and generate .txt file with current date time:

tool

Output:

Output

Let’s extend our template by adding statement blocks (<# statements #>), which can have multiple statements with variables, loops and other control statements in it:

code

Output:

Output

Here, we used utility method WriteLine (or) Write to show text in text file.

I am ending things here, inthe next article I will drill down more on T4 Templates and look into class feature blocks and template parameters etc. I hope this article will be helpful for all.