When will T4MVC support Razor with explicit HtmlHelpers for rendering partials?

Question

I've been using T4MVC for some time now and love the "explicit HtmlHelpers for rendering partials" feature, which by default is switched off. I am using T4MVC version 2.6.40.

I recently upgraded to MVC3 and noticed that no explicit HtmlHelpers are generated for Razor partials, so I looked at the source code of the T4MVC text template and found a method named "GetPartials" which has a line of code as folows:

var parts = GetControllers()
        .Select(m => m.ViewsFolder)
        .SelectMany(m => m.Views)
        .Where(m => m.Value.EndsWith(".ascx"));

So it is clear that Razor views are not supported.

I'd also like to mention that when running the T4 template (right-click > run custom tool) I get a compiler warning stating: "The C# 2.0 and C# 3.5 compilers are no longer supported. Templates will always be compiled with the version 4 compiler instead of 'v3.5' as specified."

This relates to line 18 where the template language attribute has a value of "C#v3.5". Why does it have to have an explicit version dependency? Can it not just be "C#"?

Apologies for asking two seperate questions in one post.

Counterforce

Answer 1

I just released T4MVC 2.6.42 to address this. You can get it from Codeplex or from NuGet.

Note that in order to have a razor file be detected as a partial by T4MVC, its name needs to start with an underscore (e.g. _foo.cshtml). Without this restriction, we would end up creating helper methods for all views, which would pollute things and not add value. Note that prefixing partial Razor views with _ is generally recommended by the MVC team.

As for the warning, it's unrelated and is benign. To get rid of it, just change language="C#v3.5" to language="C#". I can't make that change in the official version as that would make it break when running on 3.5 (and I don't want to maintain two separate versions just for that).

Jacklyn

Answer 2

The compiler warning you receive is just that, a warning. It is not preventing T4MVC from working.

As for supporting Razor, you've found the appropriate code in the template - simply modify it.

var parts = GetControllers()
        .Select(m => m.ViewsFolder)
        .SelectMany(m => m.Views)
        .Where(m => m.Value.EndsWith(".ascx") || m.Value.EndsWith(".cshtml") || m.Value.EndsWith(".vbhtml"));

I'd give that a try.

It's just a T4 Template, not magic. All it contains is simple c# code that gets project info from the Visual Studio environment and generates some fairly simple c# code.

Rascally

Thanks. I know T4 Templates are not magic. I definitely could have made the change myself. I just didn't want to waste my time making a change that would just be overwritten the next time I update T4MVC. I wanted to bring it to David's attention so he could release a fix so that everyone could benefit. I've actually found another bug in T4MVC since this and I know what to do to fix it, but I want to become a contributor to the project, so I've just requested to become a contributor. I hope I get accepted. – Counterforce