PerfectStorm Forum Rss Feed

New Post: Suggestions for improvements

chriseyre2000 — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:57:44 GMT

Dmitri Nesteruk suggested that I consider XQuery as an alternative to xslt.

New Post: Planned Improvements

chriseyre2000 — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:08:28 GMT

Add a function to give the filename of the generated file.

Add a function to tell if the file is new.

New Post: Planned Improvements

chriseyre2000 — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:15:59 GMT

Named block of text has been implemented in the initial version.

The new xslt functions look to be trivial to implement (maybe tomorrow)

Batch mode should be quick to implement.

Logging should also be easy to do (now that I have the config file under control).

New Post: Planned Improvements

chriseyre2000 — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:22:33 GMT

Implemented the first three utility functions.

New Post: Suggestions for samples

chriseyre2000 — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 10:30:28 GMT

I am looking for suggestions for samples for this application.

Given how flexible this utility is I can only imaging what it could be used for.
However I can see two basic patterns of usage:

(i) Run as a wizard - a one off startup for a project to create the boilerplate code that is intended to become [Handcrafted Code].
(ii) Run as a [Code Generator] to repeatedly create code that conforms to a template.

I will be providing a suite of samples that demonstrate each of the features in isolation.
I intend to write some articles (and at least one helper utility) on how to turn existing code into templates.

New Post: Planned Improvements

chriseyre2000 — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 10:20:17 GMT

The current source is rather bare boned.
It does the job that it is intended to do but is missing a few features from the utility that inspired it:

Addition xslt functions:
- convert a string to PascalCase from camelCase
- convert a string to upper case
- convert a string to lower case
Produce a log of changed files
Batch mode, where a set of transforms may be run with a single invocation of the utility (eliminates startup overhead which can be significant).
Permit version control headers to be preserved across a transform.

I intend to add each of these to the product, but using a cleaner implementation than before.

I have had some further ideas for improvements:

xslt function that can include a named block of text from the app.config file. This would permit the templates to emit a consistent header block explaining the source of the data file.
xslt function that can create and insert a guid.
xslt function that can create and insert a guid, but will associate a name with the guid. If the same name is asked for then the same guid would be returned. This would permit a single transform (or batch of transforms) to create and populate a document with the same guid in multiple locations.
xslt function that can insert the date and time.
Preprocessor function that will extract a value from a multiple line regular expression run on the old file and store it in a named variable.
Perform checks on the input model and xslt files and report useful errors.
Ensure that the product also works under Mono.
Provide a test suite