T4MVC is a helpful template for your MVC projects. You can follow the directions on David’s blog to get started; that should give you a quick understanding of what T4MVC is capable of. If you’ve yet to experience the joy of writing T4 templates, you should also check out Scott Hanselman’s Blog and Oleg Sych’s blog. You know what they say: if you haven’t been to Oleg’s T4 blog, you haven’t really “experienced” T4.

Also, a sidenote: Wayne Brantley has created a nice VS AddIn that allows for T4MVC autosaving. No more dirty, dirty (Christina Aguilera, anyone?) saving. If you’ve never tried using T4MVC without Brantley’s AddIn, consider yourself lucky. You probably haven’t had a monster-laden nightmare about right-clicking and selecting Run Custom Tool. I sure have.

Okay. Once you’ve added both T4MVC.tt and T4MVC.settings.t4 to your budding project, go ahead and rename T4MVC.tt to T4MVC.tt.base:

Change T4MVC.tt To T4MVC.base.t4

Right click on your T4MVC folder and create a new file. Name it T4MVC.tt:

Add a New T4 File, and Name it T4MVC.tt

Open T4MVC.tt. Add this preprocessor directive to the file:

<#@ Include File="T4MVC.base.t4" #>

That gives you access to all of the nice EnvDTE method madness that David has sorted out for us in his initial T4MVC file. Now, we can use the methods in T4MVC.base.t4 to generate the code that we want for our project. In this case, we’ll add some simple extensions to our HtmlHelper class that will allow for explicit partial rendering:

<#@ Include File="T4MVC.base.t4" #>

#pragma warning disable 1591
#region T4MVC Extension
namespace Big.Fat.HtmlHelpers
{
	[GeneratedCode("T4MVC", "2.0")]
	public static class ExplicitPartialBuilder
	{
	<#
            var sharedController = GetControllers()
                .Where(m => m.SharedViewFolder).First();
            var partials = sharedController
                .ViewList.Views.Where(m => m.Value.EndsWith(".ascx"));

            foreach (var prt in partials) {
			//get partial name
			var partialName = prt.Key;
			var partialPath = prt.Value;
	#>
		///<summary>
		///Render <#=partialName#> Partial.
		///Equivalent to Html.RenderPartial("<#=partialName#>");
		///</summary>
		public static void Render<#=partialName#>(this HtmlHelper html)
		{
			//render partial
			html.RenderPartial("<#=partialPath#>");
		}	

		///<summary>
		///Render <#=partialName#> Partial.
		///Equivalent to Html.RenderPartial("<#=partialName#>", model);
		///</summary>
		public static void Render<#=partialName#>(this HtmlHelper html, object model)
		{
			//render partial
			html.RenderPartial("<#=partialPath#>", model);
		}
	<# } #>
	}
}
#endregion
#pragma warning restore 1591

Right click on T4MVC.tt and select Run Custom Tool. A C# file will be generated. You can find it by expanding the T4 template. Here’s the file my project generated. (FYI, I have two lonely partials, “Header” and “Footer” in my Shared/Partials folder). Do a little searching, and you’ll find the code we generated:

#pragma warning disable 1591
#region T4MVC Extension
namespace Big.Fat.HtmlHelpers
{
	[GeneratedCode("T4MVC", "2.0")]
	public static class ExplicitPartialBuilder
	{

		///<summary>
		///Render Footer Partial.
		///Equivalent to Html.RenderPartial("Footer");
		///</summary>
		public static void RenderFooter(this HtmlHelper html)
		{
			//render partial
			html.RenderPartial("~/Views/Shared/Footer.ascx");
		}	

		///<summary>
		///Render Footer Partial.
		///Equivalent to Html.RenderPartial("Footer", model);
		///</summary>
		public static void RenderFooter(this HtmlHelper html, object model)
		{
			//render partial
			html.RenderPartial("~/Views/Shared/Footer.ascx", model);
		}						

		///<summary>
		///Render Header Partial.
		///Equivalent to Html.RenderPartial("Header");
		///</summary>
		public static void RenderHeader(this HtmlHelper html)
		{
			//render partial
			html.RenderPartial("~/Views/Shared/Header.ascx");
		}	

		///<summary>
		///Render Header Partial.
		///Equivalent to Html.RenderPartial("Header", model);
		///</summary>
		public static void RenderHeader(this HtmlHelper html, object model)
		{
			//render partial
			html.RenderPartial("~/Views/Shared/Header.ascx", model);
		}						

	}
}
#endregion
#pragma warning restore 1591

In my ViewPage, I can now render my partials with their personalized methods:

<asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">
    <% Html.RenderHeader(); %>

    ...

    <% Html.RenderFooter(); %>
</asp:Content>

Read More

• Explicit T4MVC Helpers – My Humble Contribution To MvcContrib (0)
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