madskristensen
A feature that add multiple files using a user-defined group name
Installed product versions
- Visual Studio: [2017 Enterprise]
- This extension: [3.5]
Description
When starting new projects (ASP.NET MVC in particular) I noticed that I typically add the same files every time. So I though what if I could feed the file dialog a group-name and then it expand that name into a file list. A group-name can be identified using the format @(group-name) and its corresponding file-list will come from a .json file.
Example
user-input: @(mvc)
expand-to: Views/_ViewImports.cshtml,Views/_ViewStart.cshtml,Views/_Layout.cshtml
/* itemGroups.json */
[
{
"Name": "mvc",
"FileList": ["Views/_ViewImports.cshtml", "Views/_ViewStart.cshtml", "Views/_Layout.cshtml"]
}
]
I say adding this feature will save users some time.
Should I create a pull request?
I think this is interesting, but it would be better to have a syntax that lets you type-in a name? Where for example the syntax "entity:Product" could create the files:
- Controllers/ProductController.cs
- Views/Product/Index.cshtml
- Views/Product/Edit.cshtml
- Styles/Product.less
- etc.
I like @(product) because @() is how you reference a group of files in MSBuild. Also it is important that @(product) expands-to/replaced-by Controllers/ProductController.cs, Styles/Product.less because you want to be able to add other files. For example @(product), appsettings.json expand-to Controllers/ProductController.cs, Styles/Product.less, appsettings.json.
To be clear, the expanded file-list will not appear in the file dialog, it will happen in the code-behind not the UI.
My idea was to be able to add a group of file named "entity", with filenames parametrized with the name of the entity, so that you can add a set of files for the "product" entity, then another set for the "order" entity, etc. But maybe it would just be a different feature. In your example you would need to define group of files for each possible entity name ahead of time which wouldn't really work for my use case.
I'd like to enter "Models/Users/[User.cs, Profile.cs, ProfileImage.cs]". It then adds those 3 files in Models/Users. Not sure it already works, right now I'm typing the directories for each file. EDIT - Just found out I could already do this!
