Experiment with Coral8 and T4

Scott was a big believer in a tool called CodeSmith to automatically generate code. In our group, he used it to take a Coral8 schema and generate serializers, deserializers, and something that we call "ServiceAgents". The problem was that Scott had the only CodeSmith license, so only Scott's machine was able to do the code generation. A few months ago, I had stumbled upon the T4 tool in a blog post, and I had asked Scott to switch over from CodeSmith to T4. Now, the code generation is done by a free tool that Microsoft includes in Visual Studio, so now everyone can experiment with automatic code generation.

A few weeks ago, I found an article in Visual Studio magazine about T4, and then I saw that Chris Donnan was experimenting with T4.

So, I decided to spend an hour last weekend and code up my own T4 Coral8 class generator. I did not bother to read the T4 manual, but I was impressed with what I could rig up in a very short time. This generates a class for every Coral8 CCS file in a certain directory.

This isn't world-class code .... I generated nullable types and I did not bother to generate null-checking code on the nullable fields. But, feel free to modify it.

I will certainly use T4 to generate classes and serializers/derserializers for Orinoco.

<#@ template language="C#" #>
<#@ assembly name="System.Xml" #>
<#@ import namespace="System.IO" #>
<#@ import namespace="System.Xml" #>
<#@ import namespace="System.Collections.Generic" #>


using System;
using Coral8.Transport;
using Coral8.Value;

<# 
    DirectoryInfo dir = new DirectoryInfo(@"v:\dev\CEP\C8Projects\Schemas");
    foreach (FileInfo file in dir.GetFiles("*.ccs"))
    {
        string sSchemaFile = file.Name.Replace(".ccs", "").Replace("-", "");
        List<Info> colInfo = new List<Info>();
        using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(file.FullName))
        {
            XmlDocument xmldoc = new XmlDocument();
            xmldoc.Load(reader);
            XmlNodeList columns = xmldoc.GetElementsByTagName("Column");
            foreach (XmlNode node in columns)
            {
                string colName = node.Attributes["Name"].Value;
                string type = node.Attributes["xsi:type"].Value;
                string netType = "unknown";
                string c8FieldType = "unknown";
                
                if (type.StartsWith("String"))
                {
                    netType = "string";
                    c8FieldType = "StringFieldValue";
                }
                else if (type.StartsWith("Int"))
                {
                    netType = "int?";
                    c8FieldType = "IntegerFieldValue";
                }
                else if (type.StartsWith("Long"))
                {
                    netType = "long?";
                    c8FieldType = "LongFieldValue";
                }    
                else if (type.StartsWith("Time"))
                {
                    netType = "DateTime?";
                    c8FieldType = "TimeFieldValue";
                }    
                else if (type.StartsWith("Float"))
                {
                    netType = "double?";
                    c8FieldType = "FloatFieldValue";
                }    
                else if (type.StartsWith("Bool"))
                {
                    netType = "bool?";
                    c8FieldType = "BooleanFieldValue";
                }    
                else if (type.StartsWith("Xml"))
                {
                    netType = "string";
                    c8FieldType = "XmlFieldValue";
                }
                
                colInfo.Add(new Info(colName, netType, c8FieldType));
            } // end foreach node
        } // end using
#>

#region <#= sSchemaFile #> Serializer
public class <#= sSchemaFile #>
{
<# 
        foreach (Info info in colInfo)
        {
#>
    public <#= info.NetType #> <#= info.Name #>;
<#
        }
#>        
    public void ToObject(Tuple tuple)
    {
<# 
        foreach (Info info in colInfo)
        {
            if (info.C8FieldValue == "TimeFieldValue")
            {
#>        
        this.<#= info.Name #> = new DateTime(((<#= info.C8FieldValue #>) tuple.GetFieldValue("<#= info.Name #>")).Value.Value);
<#
            }
            else
            {
#>        
        this.<#= info.Name #> = ((<#= info.C8FieldValue #>) tuple.GetFieldValue("<#= info.Name #>")).Value;
<#
            }
        }
#>        
    }
    
    public Tuple ToTuple()
    {
        Tuple tuple = new Tuple();
<# 
        foreach (Info info in colInfo)
        {
            if (info.C8FieldValue == "TimeFieldValue")
            {
#>        
        tuple.SetFieldValue("<#= info.Name #>", new <#= info.C8FieldValue #>(this.<#= info.Name #>.Value.Ticks));
<#
            }
            else if (info.C8FieldValue == "StringFieldValue" || info.C8FieldValue == "XmlFieldValue")
            {
#>
        tuple.SetFieldValue("<#= info.Name #>", new <#= info.C8FieldValue #>(this.<#= info.Name #>));
<#            
            }
            else
            {
#>        
        tuple.SetFieldValue("<#= info.Name #>", new <#= info.C8FieldValue #>(this.<#= info.Name #>.Value));
<#
            }
        }
#>

        return tuple;
    }
}
#endregion
<#
    }
#>
<#+
    public class Info
    {
        public string Name;
        public string NetType;
        public string C8FieldValue;
        
        public Info(string name, string type, string val)
        {
            this.Name = name;
            this.NetType = type;
            this.C8FieldValue = val;
        }
    }
#>

©2009 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved.
All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.