Two Custom tool s for a single file?

Question

I want to generate some code from my dbml(Linq to Sql) file,the dbml file is placed in many part of my project So I wrote a custom tool for this purpose

But the problem is that dbml already has contained MSLinqToSQLGenerator custom tool ,

So do you know any way to set two custom tools for one file, If no, Let me know your idea about that

Answer 1

You'd get proper control on the T4 if you include the LINQ to SQL T4 generator in your template's responsibility.

If I understood properly, you want to keep the default behavior of .dbml generator, but also add your own.

This seemed a bit "old", and I haven't personally used LINQ to SQL for some time, but I did use this as-is replacement of T4 generator, that produced the equivalent of the standard .dbml generator.

https://github.com/damieng/L2ST4

Not sure if that's up to date with VS 2010 version, but you can always compare the standard .dbml generated code and this T4 output and make proper changes to achieve identical outcome.

Of course you can simply have multiple different generators, and simply run them with "Transform All Templates", but based on your question, you'd want the generator to be attached to the file specific custom tool.

You might want to check out (unless its already familiar to you) also T4 Toolbox https://github.com/olegsych/T4Toolbox that adds "T4ScriptFileGenerator" custom tool to a file. It effectively runs the T4 code when the file changes.

Answer 2

Visual Studio will only support a single "Custom Tool" per file, but you can add a pre-compilation step to run other tools against anything you want. For instance, I have the following pre-compile step set on the "Build Events" tab of one of my projects.

"$(DevEnvDir)..\..\..\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\TextTemplating\10.0\TextTransform" "$(ProjectDir)DataContext\Northwind.proxy.tt"

There's a lot of relative pathing going on here in order to find the T4 command-line tool, but you get the idea. This particular T4 file counts on being in the same directory as the .dbml file that it reads to generate its output.

Before the project is compiled, you can run whatever external tool you want. Just make sure that after the first run, you include the tool's output in the project. After that, since the file gets changed as part of a PRE-compile step, it will always be updated in each build.