Running t4 preprocessed template from cli

Question

When I right click my .tt files and select "run custom tool" from Visual Studio 2022 the .cs output files generate perfectly however when I try to run TextTransform.exe or TextTransformCore.exe from Powershell CLI the transformation fails with the following error:

error CS0103: Compiling transformation: The name 's_data' does not exist in the current context

But the name s_data is declared in a partial class that matched the template and is recognised fine when ran using the VS "run custom tool" option.

Code in SideNavTemplate.tt file:

<#@ template language="C#" #>
<#@ assembly name="System.Core" #>
<#@ import namespace="System.Linq" #>
<#@ import namespace="System.Text" #>
<#@ import namespace="System.Collections.Generic" #>


<ul class="side_nav">

    <# foreach (MenuItem sideItem in s_data) { #>
        ...
    <# } #>

</ul>

Code in partial class:

using System.Xml.Linq;

namespace Excelerator.Models;

partial class SideNavTemplate
{
    private List<MenuItem> s_data;
    public SideNavTemplate(List<MenuItem> data) { s_data = data; }
}

public class MenuItem
{
    public string label { get; set; }
    public string route { get; set; }
    public List<MenuItem> subMenu { get; set; }
    public List<MenuItem> sideData { get; set; }
    public FormItem form {  get; set; }
    public string role { get; set; }
}

public class FormItem
{
    public string name { get; set; }
}

Tried calling TextTransform.exe from the directory both files are in but no joy it will not recognise the s_data property.

The custom tool property of the .tt file is TextTemplatingFilePreprocessor

Any help getting this to run would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

There is a possible solution here

Another way to go is to also include the partial classes in a .ttinclude file and generate those as well.

If you need T4 files to be generated before build events, you can consider using T4Executer