CodegenCS is a Toolkit for doing Code Generation using plain C#.

Before anything else, don't forget to read the Main Project Page to learn the basics (basic idea, basic features, and major components).

Models

Templates can read from any data source (a file or a database or anything else) but Models are our built-in mechanism for easily providing inputs to templates.

Both Visual Studio Extension and Command-line tool can load models using IModelFactory:

void Main(ICodegenTextWriter writer, IModelFactory factory)
{
    MyModel model = factory.LoadModelFromFile<MyModel>("MyModel.json");
    // ...
}

Command-line tool can also receive models as arguments - like dotnet-codegencs template run <template> <model>.
Models are expected to be a path to a file in JSON format, and dotnet-codegencs will load/deserialize them according to the type expected by the template.

Templates with Custom Models

See Writing Templates with Custom Models

Out-of-the-box Models

Common tasks like generating code based on a Database Schema or based on a REST API specification can be achieved using our out-of-the-box models, so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

DatabaseSchema

Represents the schema of a relational database.

The dotnet-codegencs tool has commands to extract a database schema (reverse engineer) creating a json model from existing MSSQL or PostgreSQL databases.

NSwagAdapter

Can read a REST API model using OpenAPI (aka Swagger) (using RicoSuter NSwag).