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I'm building a set of T4 templates that gather their data from an XML file. Is there any way to force Visual Studio to regenerate the templates when the XML file is changed?
Presently, the developers must modify the XML file and then rebuild each template to get the changes. My goal is to hide the T4 templates from the developer altogether so they don't have to do any action other than updating the XML file.
Other information: We're using Visual Studio 2008 Visual Basic projects.
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T4 templates in entity framework are used to generate C# or VB entity classes from EDMX files. Visual Studio 2013 or 2012 provides two templates- EntityObject Generator and DBContext Generator for creating C# or VB entity classes. The additional templates are also available for download.
In Visual Studio, a T4 text template is a mixture of text blocks and control logic that can generate a text file. The control logic is written as fragments of program code in Visual C# or Visual Basic. In Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 and later, you can use C# version 6.0 features in T4 templates directives.
Include the file into your Visual Studio project. In Solution Explorer, on the shortcut menu of the project, choose Add > Existing Item. Set the file's Custom Tools property to TextTemplatingFilePreprocessor. In Solution Explorer, on the shortcut menu of the file, choose Properties.
T4 templates are the sample code written in the files, this may be View code / controller code / web config code. Whenever you create the MVC project, Controller, View automated code is written by Visual Studio. This code is referred from these templates.
I was looking for a similar capability a few months ago but all I found indicated that you can't invalidate template output automatically when another file is changed. (E.g. There is no way to declare that a template "depends" on another file, Makefile style.)
I wound up actually just writing a custom MSBuild task that deletes all T4 output files, effectively forcing all of the templates to be re-run on every build. This may be overkill for your needs, especially if the templates take a long time to run, but maybe you can hack together something to check template dependencies.
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