Retrieving fluent configuration programatically wi

I have a DbContext derived class whose member entity classes are configured using Fluent API. I want to retrieve these configurations and relationships programatically. the code to do this is already in place and I am porting it to a T4 template for code generation.

While most of the code generation uses reflection, fluent configuration requires the context class to be instantiated in order to get:

ObjectContext
EntityObjects
EntityContainer
EntitySets
Etcetera

Since we are not using property attributes, reflection is of no help.

This works fine during runtime, but instatiating the DbContext within a T4 template is causing all sorts of problems. It sometimes crashes VS, gives weird errors, creates a cyclic dependency, etc.

If I debug the T4 template, it does run without errors but the background process locks the project containing the DbContext class and entities. So every time there is a change to the entities, I have to restart VS three times performing different steps. Yuck!

I was wondering if there is a way to retrieve entity metadata/configuration without instantiating the context class. Any guidance would be appreciated.

Well, you need to load the context because it needs to call OnModelBuilding(DbModelBuilder) at least once to do it's business; otherwise there is no model to interrogate.

If you want, you can store off the information as XML using EdmxWriter;

    public static string ToEdmx(this System.Data.Entity.DbContext context)
    {
        var sb = new StringBuilder();

        using (var textWriter = new StringWriter(sb))
        using (var xmlWriter = System.Xml.XmlWriter.Create(textWriter, new System.Xml.XmlWriterSettings { Indent = true, IndentChars = "    " }))
        {
            System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.EdmxWriter.WriteEdmx(context, xmlWriter);
            textWriter.Flush();
        }

        return sb.ToString();
    }

This will give you an XML document with the data model. You can probably save that to disk in one process, and interrogate that file in your TT file.