dotnet-t4: Use -c without specifying class name

[bricelam]

I hate the redundancy of specifying commands like this to preprocess templates:

t4 -c MyTemplate MyTemplate.tt

I'd love to see a new option that infers the class name from the input file so I can just specify something like this:

t4 --preprocess MyTemplate.tt

[bricelam]

Hmm, looks like you'd also need a way to specify the namespace.

Maybe this issue isn't really worth it in the end.

[mhutch]

This seems reasonable to me - even if it's no more concise, eliminating redundancy helps reduce user error.

Maybe just t4 -n SomeNamespace SomeClassname.tt ?

[zha999]

@bricelam
If you are add command in project config file (e.g. csproj), you may try the method of https://github.com/nogic1008/T4Sample.

<Exec WorkingDirectory="$(ProjectDir)" Command="dotnet t4 %(TextTemplate.Identity) -c $(RootNameSpace).%(TextTemplate.Filename) -o %(TextTemplate.Filename).Generated.cs" />

[trysetnull]

We have a similar use-case; we want to achieve similar functionality to the legacy custom tool built into Visual Studio.
Here, the class name and namespace is resolved automatically.

In the end we ended up with creating a new ItemGroup (T4Template) in our csproj files and essentially doing:

<ItemGroup>
    <T4TemplateWithMetadata Include="@(T4Template)">
      <OutputFile>%(RelativeDir)%(Filename).g.cs</OutputFile>
      <Namespace>$([System.String]::Copy('$(RootNamespace).%(RelativeDir)%(Filename)').Replace('\', '.').Replace('/', '.'))</Namespace>
    </T4TemplateWithMetadata>
</ItemGroup>

Then we can call the dotnet tool t4, like so:

<Exec Command="dotnet tool run t4 --out=&quot;%(T4TemplateWithMetadata.OutputFile)&quot; -I=&quot;%(T4TemplateWithMetadata.Identity)&quot; --class=&quot;%(T4TemplateWithMetadata.Namespace)&quot; &quot;%(T4TemplateWithMetadata.FullPath)&quot;"
          ContinueOnError="false"
          StandardOutputImportance="normal"
          StandardErrorImportance="high" />

This works but feels incredibly clunky, would be great if the T4.BuildTools would support this out-of-the-box.