Skip to main content

A DD4T.net Implementation - The Model Generator Tool

Image
By
The post presents a tool that automatically generates DD4T .net strongly typed models from Tridion Schemas.

In the previous posts Strong Typed Models and Umbrella Models, I presented a flavour of strongly type models to be used with DD4T .NET. The tedious part with these models, is that one needs to write them manually one by one, while carefully checking the type of each field in the Schema, the single vs multi-value property, the Allowed Schemas, etc.

This is an ideal candidate for automation and code generation and that's exactly what this Model Generator is doing:
  • Connect to a Tridion CM instance using Core Service and download all Schemas of type Component, Multimedia and Embedded
  • Build an internal model for each Schema, each field in it, retaining all return types, field name, allowed Schemas, multi- and single-value
  • Generate individual C# classes for each Schema model, generating the using statements, class, properties for each Schema field, constructor

The Model Generator is in fact a simple Console application, making use of Core Service client and creating .cs files in a predefined location.

The application .config file must define the following settings:

<add key="TridionCmeUrl" value="http://my.tridion.com"/>  - defines the Tridion CME URL to connect to using Core Service
<add key="Username" value="mihai.cadariu"/>  - the username to use when connecting
<add key="Password" value="password"/>  - the password to use when connecting
<add key="StartTcmUri" value="tcm:0-13-1"/>  - the Publication or Folder to search Schemas under
<add key="Namespace" value="Mitza.DD4T.Model"/>  - the namespace to use when generating models
<add key="Folder" value="C:\Mitza.DD4T.Model"/>  - the folder on local file system where .cs files are generated

The entire Model Generator solution, including sources, dlls and executable are available on this blog's GitHub page, project Model Generator.



Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Nice post Mihai. Did you look at using T4 templates to do the generation?
18 September, 2015 15:05
Mihai Cădariu said…
I will now :)
So far I'm only writing strings to a file. Quick and it gets the job done.
18 September, 2015 16:41
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scaling Policies

By
This post is part of a bigger topic Autoscaling Publishers in AWS . In a previous post we talked about the Auto Scaling Groups , but we didn't go into details on the Scaling Policies. This is the purpose of this blog post. As defined earlier, the Scaling Policies define the rules according to which the group size is increased or decreased. These rules are based on instance metrics (e.g. CPU), CloudWatch custom metrics, or even CloudWatch alarms and their states and values. We defined a Scaling Policy with Steps, called 'increase_group_size', which is triggered first by the CloudWatch Alarm 'Publish_Alarm' defined earlier. Also depending on the size of the monitored CloudWatch custom metric 'Waiting for Publish', the Scaling Policy with Steps can add a difference number of instances to the group. The scaling policy sets the number of instances in group to 1 if there are between 1000 and 2000 items Waiting for Publish in the queue. It also sets the
Post a Comment
Read more

Running sp_updatestats on AWS RDS database

By
Part of the maintenance tasks that I perform on a MSSQL Content Manager database is to run stored procedure sp_updatestats . exec sp_updatestats However, that is not supported on an AWS RDS instance. The error message below indicates that only the sa  account can perform this: Msg 15247 , Level 16 , State 1 , Procedure sp_updatestats, Line 15 [Batch Start Line 0 ] User does not have permission to perform this action. Instead there are several posts that suggest using UPDATE STATISTICS instead: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/145982/sp-updatestats-vs-update-statistics I stumbled upon the following post from 2008 (!!!), https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/186e3db0-fe37-4c31-b017-8e7c24d19697/spupdatestats-fails-to-run-with-permission-error-under-dbopriveleged-user , which describes a way to wrap the call to sp_updatestats and execute it under a different user: create procedure dbo.sp_updstats with execute as 'dbo' as
1 comment
Read more

Toolkit - Dynamic Content Queries

By
This post if part of a series about the  File System Toolkit  - a custom content delivery API for SDL Tridion. This post presents the Dynamic Content Query capability. The requirements for the Toolkit API are that it should be able to provide CustomMeta queries, pagination, and sorting -- all on the file system, without the use third party tools (database, search engines, indexers, etc). Therefore I had to implement a simple database engine and indexer -- which is described in more detail in post Writing My Own Database Engine . The querying logic does not make use of cache. This means the query logic is executed every time. When models are requested, the models are however retrieved using the ModelFactory and those are cached. Query Class This is the main class for dynamic content queries. It is the entry point into the execution logic of a query. The class takes as parameter a Criterion (presented below) which triggers the execution of query in all sub-criteria of a Criterio
Post a Comment
Read more