Running a T4 template using C#

Question

I have T4 template (mycode.tt) which generates a cs file. I usually right click the tt file and select RunCustomTool which internally takes an xml file and generate code for me.

Answer 1

You can easily achieve it, when you using VS2010. If you add a new file to the project, choose a preprocessed text template file. You can edit the template just as normal. Instead of generating the output directly, the file generates the code that is generated normally. I know it sounds confusing. But what you see in your output file is the code generated by the text templating toolkit to get your output (more or less).

This is a short example of a preprocessed text template named "TestTemplate.tt" and how do you use it in your code:

The tt-file:

<#@ template language="C#" #>
Some output.

Code:

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace Test
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            TestTemplate testTemplate = new TestTemplate();
            Debug.Print(testTemplate.TransformText());
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

I'd recommend the preprocessed route as answered above by @jb_.

As an alternative, if you need your templates to still be editable without a compile step for use with your custom C# application, and the application will only be deployed on machines alongside Visual Studio, you can write a custom host.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126519.aspx