Creating templates requires a lot of access to the thing you’re currently creating. That’s the current output type, which as I discussed in yesterday I suffix with “Info.” The CurrentTypeInfo is thus what you’re currently outputting.
I neglected to clarify in that post that the Data and the Info classes are in entirely different assemblies. The Data classes could be used with any .NET generation mechanism, including (at least) XML Literal code generation and CodeSmith. The Info objects are relatively specific to my style of code generation.
The CurrentTypeInfo may not be the same throughout the file.
There are a few reasons to combine multiple classes or enums in a file. In some cases, that’s to nest them, and in some cases it’s just to logically combine them in a file. While FxCop has declared them unfashionable, I find nested classes tremendously valuable, especially for organizing Intellisense and keeping well structured classes and naming. If you’re working with nested classes, there is a good chance you’ll need to access not only the current type, but also the encapsulating type. I use a stack for this, and give control of pushing and popping TypeInfo objects from the stack to the templates themselves.
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The base item on the stack is the current outer most class in the current file. Once you’ve pulled a class off the stack, such as by popping the base and adding a new base TypeInfo, you can’t access the previous version unless you’ve saved it.
Here’s where you see the flaw I mentioned yesterday – these classes could be in separate namespaces, and I don’t allow for that – yet. I’ll fix it later.
Remember the TypeInfo is the thing you’re outputting. The entity definition it’s built from is ObjectData in my semantics.
The stack is an extremely useful construct for this scenario. You have quick access to information about the class you’re currently outputting. You’ll frequently need this for type information and perhaps calling shared/static methods. You don’t want to recreate its name every time you use it because that would be redundant and hard to maintain. You can also access any of the containing classes, which again is useful in defining types and calling shared/static methods.
While I haven’t done this in CodeSmith, I expect this technique to be viable there. I’m not sure on other platforms, but it’s not specific to XML literal code generation.
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