Transform Text Templates On Build

NOTE: this repository is no longer actively maintained. T4 has long been surpassed by far more capable templating alternatives (i.e. Scriban and may others) and there's even an open source Mono implementation which is far faster that the (effectively legacy) T4 in VS. Running T4 templates as part of the build did never seem to be a core design or intended usage, and it's consequently quite painful and slow in general. Switching CI and updating the project to use newer techniques and fix the many reported issues is something that just didn't make sense anymore. Feel free to fork and do anything you want with it, that's the beauty of open source :). If you want to volunteer as a maintainer, please let us know at https://github.com/clariuslabs/TransformOnBuild/issues/68

Automatically transforms on build all files with a build action of None or Content that have the TextTemplatingFileGenerator or TransformOnBuild custom tools associated.

Installation

To install Clarius Transform Text Templates On Build, run the following command in the Package Manager Console:

PM> Install-Package Clarius.TransformOnBuild

Unlike the officially suggested way, this package does not require any Visual Studio SDK to be installed on the machine or build server.

If a full Visual Studio installation is not available on the build server, you can still transform the templates by placing the TextTransform.exe in a known location. Then, you can simply override the path expected by the targets with:

<PropertyGroup>
    <TextTransformPath>MyTools\TextTransform.exe</TextTransformPath>
</PropertyGroup>

With that in place, the transformation will be performed using that file instead, if found.

If you would like to pass parameters to TextTransform.exe, define a group of TextTransformParameter items as follows:

<ItemGroup>
    <TextTransformParameter Include="Foo">
        <Value>bar</Value>
        <InProject>false</InProject>
    </TextTransformParameter>
    <TextTransformParameter Include="Config">
        <Value>$(Configuration)</Value>
        <InProject>false</InProject>
    </TextTransformParameter>
</ItemGroup>

The Include attribute specifies the parameter name, and the Value metadata element specifies the parameter value.

To access the parameter values from your text template, set hostspecific in the template directive and invoke this.Host.ResolveParameterValue(...). For example:

<#@ template language="C#" hostspecific="true" #>
<#
    var foo = this.Host.ResolveParameterValue("", "", "Foo");
    var config = this.Host.ResolveParameterValue("", "", "Config");
#>