Feature Request: Template File Locations/Definitions
Posted: Fri 09 Apr 2010 19:01
Moved this from the Oracle forum, realized it would be much more productive here:
First, your T4 Template change was excellent and I applaud the changes made to Entity Developer, it's improved immensely since our purchase of dotConnect. Since we have a custom template, being able to compare your templates between releases and quickly update our custom one has saved a tremendous amount of time.
Now for the request: Currently we can't move completely out of Entity Developer and into Visual Studio because of how the templates are defined (at least, as far as I can tell...please correct me if I'm wrong). The reason is that the Templates you can choose to generate from example: LINQ C# or LINQ VB...this model doesn't work so well if you're using a custom template and source control.
If the DataContext .edps file could have the option to point straight at a the .tmpl file instead of relying on available templates defined elsewhere (as far as I can tell, only via Entity Developer). A bonus would be if this file could work with a .t4 extension just the same, it would work in the T4 template editing engine we use inside Visual Studio 2008 (unless you already have future plans to provide the engine that is in Entity Developer inside Visual Studio, which would also be a great solution).
Further, this reference would have work as a relative file path (to the model hopefully). For example right now I use this path: C:\Projects\... and a coworker uses C:\Development\.... While this works fine for everything else because source control systems exclusively use relative paths...it breaks because the template, also in source control, is in 2 different absolute paths on our machines.
Thanks for the great support guys, if a change like this could land in a future release it would make your model fully "source-controllable" which would be a huge plus from our view, hopefully for other potential customers as well.
First, your T4 Template change was excellent and I applaud the changes made to Entity Developer, it's improved immensely since our purchase of dotConnect. Since we have a custom template, being able to compare your templates between releases and quickly update our custom one has saved a tremendous amount of time.
Now for the request: Currently we can't move completely out of Entity Developer and into Visual Studio because of how the templates are defined (at least, as far as I can tell...please correct me if I'm wrong). The reason is that the Templates you can choose to generate from example: LINQ C# or LINQ VB...this model doesn't work so well if you're using a custom template and source control.
If the DataContext .edps file could have the option to point straight at a the .tmpl file instead of relying on available templates defined elsewhere (as far as I can tell, only via Entity Developer). A bonus would be if this file could work with a .t4 extension just the same, it would work in the T4 template editing engine we use inside Visual Studio 2008 (unless you already have future plans to provide the engine that is in Entity Developer inside Visual Studio, which would also be a great solution).
Further, this reference would have work as a relative file path (to the model hopefully). For example right now I use this path: C:\Projects\... and a coworker uses C:\Development\.... While this works fine for everything else because source control systems exclusively use relative paths...it breaks because the template, also in source control, is in 2 different absolute paths on our machines.
Thanks for the great support guys, if a change like this could land in a future release it would make your model fully "source-controllable" which would be a huge plus from our view, hopefully for other potential customers as well.