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

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...
2 comments
Read more

REL Standard Tag Library

By
The RSTL is a library of REL tags providing standard functionality such as iterating collections, conditionals, imports, assignments, XML XSLT transformations, formatting dates, etc. RSTL distributable is available on my Google Code page under  REL Standard Tag Library . Always use the latest JAR . This post describes each RSTL tag in the library explaining its functionality, attributes and providing examples. For understanding the way expressions are evaluated, please read my post about the  Expression Language used by REL Standard Tag Library . <c:choose> / <c:when> / <c:otherwise> Syntax:     <c:choose>         <c:when test="expr1">             Do something         </c:when>         <c:when test="expr2">             Do something else         </c:when...
2 comments
Read more

Publish Binaries to Mapped Structure Groups

By Unknown
Today's TBB of the Week comes from the high demand in the field to publish binary assets to different mapped Structure Groups. By default SDL Tridion offers two ways of publishing binaries: All binaries publish to a folder defined in your Publication properties; All binaries rendered by a given template publish to a folder corresponding to a given Structure Group; In my view, both cases are terrible, over-simplified and not representing a real use-case. Nobody in the field wants all binaries in one folder and nobody separates binary locations by template. Instead, everybody wants a mapping mechanism that takes a binary and publishes it to a given folder, defined by a Structure Group, and this mapping is done using some kind of metadata. More often than not, the metadata is the TCM Folder location of the Multimedia Component. I have seen this implemented numerous times. So the solution to publish binaries to a given location implies finding a mapping from a TCM Folder to a...
10 comments
Read more