DSL Tools

New T4 Template Visual Studio Editor.

Jose Escrich — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:31:18 GMT

During this past month I've been working in a new T4 template editor as a part of the SFT.

If you're working with dsl or gax you already know, how the editor looks when you try to edit a text template file, it looks like this:

So now you can have a fully colorized text editor for your T4 templates like the ASP.NET Vs editor and you can get it now downlaoding the ClariuS Software Factories Toolkit here.

Colorizing, Intellisense and Validation

In this release it's providing colorizing and intellisense for the T4 statements, like directives, class features and blocks. Regarding the directives you have intellisense for all well known directives and its properties and values.

One interesting feature is for those the well known properties which represents a type, the intellisense gives a complete list of the current project types including its references.

Validation

Like the ASP.NET editor you have a real time document validation.

Preview Transformation

One useful feature is the possibility to run a template transformation in design time, basically as you know, there are two common contexts to run t4 templates, that's a DSLTools Host and GAX Host. When you use the GAX host, most probably you use properties, so you can specify those properties values through the editor property window.

If you want to use complex types you can specify in the property declaration an UITypeEditor and a TypeConverter if it's needed.

So to run the transformation you just have to specify some values for the properties and run the preview transformation commands, which is located at top of solution explorer or in the editor context menu. After running the transformation you get a temp file with the output. If you've specified the ouput extension directive the temp file will have that extension, that's useful so that so to instantiate the proper Vs editor for that output file.

The transformation could fail for different reasons, if the transformation fails when the template is compiled you'll get those errors into visual studio error list, however if the transformation fails after the compilation and when the template is running you'll get the errors in a temp output file.

Debugging

Unfortunately, in this version the editor does not have debug yet, however in the meantime you can check the Garethj's Blog, there he has a post of how you can debug a template. I hope we could include this feature on future versions.

What's coming

We're working in one important feature which is supporting intellisense and colorizing for the embedded language like you already have in the ASP.NET editor.

You can try it now, download the Clarius Software Factories Toolkit from here.

Enjoy.

Recipe Designer and SFT June CTP

Jose Escrich — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:29:48 GMT

Today we shipped the June CTP of the Clarius Software Factories Toolkit, which includes a new version of the Recipe Designer. The main change what I've been working on, is the serialization behavior in order to support round tripping, beside that was an interesting opportunity to work implementing a custom serialization in a Dsl.

So now if you change the .xml extension of the recipe definition file with .recipe extension, you'll get a graphical representation of your recipe, the only constraint that it has is that it is not supporting XInclude.

Key features

Round tripping: Now you can edit your recipe using the default xml editor as usual maintaining the synchronization with the designer with no extra work.

Improved User Experience: Simplest new ToolBox. Now you basically have two connectors, one to connect arguments with wizard fields or action properties and another to define the flow between actions and between pages. Also the shapes includes useful information like the friendly type name and in the case of arguments if it's required or not

Main manifest syncronization: if the recipe definition is well formed, you'll get an xinclude of your recipe in the main manifest file. Also if the recipe already has a unbounded reference, it will be added in the BindingRecipe recipe.

Configurable Attributes Support: You can define in the designer view all your configurable attributes in any element that support it, like actions, valueproviders, etc.

We're working on the next release of Software Factories Toolkit, your comments, suggestions and bug reports are welcome. You can give your feedback through SFT Forums.
http://softwarefactoriestoolkit.net/forums.aspx

Download Software Factories Toolkit Here.

Testing T4 templates using the GAX host

Jose Escrich — Thu, 03 May 2007 20:56:20 GMT

Download Sample Package

I guess that there are not a best approach to do the tests without a built in support in the T4 template host. Nevertheless in the Web Service Software Factory we did a very first approach of how you could write test units for t4 templates.

Suppose that we have a template which the output is a simple class, in the following example I did a simple package which contains a T4 template called Programs.cs.t4 so, the idea is, run the transformation and then try to compile the class to get its Type in order to make asserts using reflection.

In the attached sample fixture it has an ExecuteTemplate helper method which has the logic to run the transformation and then try to compile it. (considering that the output is a .cs class, if not, it could return an XmlDocument in case that the transformation results in an xml file).

In the next picture you've the TestMethod which runs the transformation, gets the returned type and then perform different asserts over it.

Notice that you should have created a link to the T4 template file and set the *Copy to Output* property as "Copy if newer" as showing in the following image, this is an important thing because the TestMethod is marked with the DeploymentItemAttribute in order to have the t4 file in the test context. Also you have to reference the Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.VisualStudio.Library and Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextTemplating assemblies which are located in the PublicAssemblies folder.

Download Sample Package

DSL Tools: how to change the size, position and order of the swimlanes.

Jose Escrich — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 18:39:00 GMT

There are an easily way to change the position, size and order of the swimlane shapes in your dsl. To do that, you just have to create a partial class of the swimlane that you want to modify its boundary and then override its BoundRules property, like this:

Also you must create the BoundRules custom class and override the GetCompliantBounds method which returns the rectangle in which the swimlane will be painted. This method receives the shape and the proposed rectangle, with those values you can alter any of that as you wish.

Specifying the rectangle you be able to change the location X,Y and also the size of that swimlane.

Enjoy.