BibliTech's Roslyn ViewModels is a small dotnet tool to generate raw view model files from Entity Framework entity files. View Model files in this scope is a file without any link/reference properties. For example:

This tool will scan the entire folder and generate a single file with your basic View Model classes.

Installation

Roslyn ViewModels uses .NET Core tools to execute. You will need .NET Core >= 2.1 installed.

You can either install Roslyn ViewModels per-project or globally on the PC.

Install globally

To install once and run anywhere, run this command once:

dotnet tool install dotnet-viewmodel -g

NOTE: the current version does not work for global tool yet. I will try to fix it as soon as possible. Please use the per-project for now.

Install per-project

To use the tool for the current project only, open your .csproj file with any text-editor. You need to add the following lines:

<ItemGroup>
    <DotNetCliToolReference Include="dotnet-viewmodel" Version="1.0.4" />
</ItemGroup>

Note: please always check for newest version of the tool. Sometimes I may forget to update the version number in this README file.

To make sure it works, please try running dotnet restore or dotnet build afterwards (you don't need to run any nuget install).

Use the tool

Using your command line (note: please do not use Nuget Package Manager console in Visual Studio), run the following command:

dotnet viewmodel -?

You should see the help text for using the tool. You can see the full demo command in this file.

For example:

dotnet viewmodel Entities ViewModels\EntityViewModels.cs

will tell the tool to scan the Entities folder and output the result into ViewModels\EntityViewModel.cs file.

The parameters

All the parameters are optional. Example:

dotnet viewmodel Entities ViewModels\EntityViewModels.cs -c "{0}ViewModel" -ns "BibliTech.Demo.ViewModels" -attr "ViewModel, EntityViewModel" -bases "BaseViewModel, IViewModel" -u "BibliTech" -u "BibliTech.Roslyn.ViewModels.Demo" -f

• -f: Force overwriting the result. Without -f, if the output file exists, the tool will not do anything and print out an error.
• -c: the class name of the output ViewModel, the default is {0}BasicViewModel. For example, if your entity class name is Account, the output file in the example will be AccountViewModel.
• -ns the namespace of the output file.
• -attr If you want to append any attribute(s) to the output classes, use this.
• -bases If you want to add any inheritance declaration, use this option.
• -u Add using directives at the beginning of the files. The System value is there by default so don't add it.