uigen.exe configuration file

The uigen.exe config file is the configuration file for uigen.exe.
It specifies "placeholders" and their values, which uigen.exe uses in
the templates. You can find the sample uigen.exe config file
here: sample uigen.exe configuration file. As always, it assumes
canonical project structure, and that the re-motion framework is
located in a sub-directory of the solution, as explained here:
PhoneBook project structure.

There is also a settings node with path information to uigen.exe templates.

Settings and <applicationGenerator template...>

The template attribute contains the path to the uigen.exe master file,
always TabbedEditor.xml.

templateRoot: which set of templates to use
for generating the web application project.

For re-motion version 1.13.6. and lower, these directories
are located under the Remotion directory, the root directory
of the re-motion distribution. Since uigen.exe can only
handle absolute paths, you must adapt them to your particular
location of that directory.

targetRoot: This is the solution root, not the root directory
for the web project, i.e. the top-level directory for all your
Visual Studio sub-projects.

Just as the name suggests, the namespace settings are namespaces, NOT
paths:

projectNameSpaceRoot: namespace of the web application project
domainNameSpaceRoot: namespace of the domain project

Visual Studio mildly enforces that the directory name of a project
is the same as the namespace, so this might not matter if you follow
this convention. However, if you don't, make sure that you specified
the namespace.

Instead of a listing with complicated syntactic variables, here
is an illustration of what is which, with the PhoneBook project
as example:

Placeholders

The placeholder entries are key-value pairs of the form

<replace from="$key$" to="value" />

You might be tempted to nest such declarations, as in

<replace from="$RemotionAssembly$" to="\PhoneBook\Remotion\net-3.5\bin\Debug" />
<!-- RemotionAssembly and WxeEngine are always the same, so... !-->
<replace from="$WebClientAssembly$" to="$RemotionAssembly$" />

However, this won't work. uigen.exe can't resolve placeholders in
value strings. This is the reason why it can't handle relative paths, by
the way.

$ReferencesDir$ : the name of the directory in
the web application project for storing the
references to the domain- and re-motion assemblies
By convention, this node is named "References" in
Visual Studio, so that's probably what you will use
for the placeholder value.
$DomainProjectName$ : the name of the directory with the
domain project in Visual Studio (not to be confused with the
namespace)
$DomainProjectAssembly$ : The name of the domain assembly
that shall be inspected by uigen.exe (i.e. where to find
the domain object classes, without ".dll")
$WebProjectName$ : the name of the directory with the web application
project in Visual Studio. (generated by uigen.exe.)
$WebClientAssembly$ : the name of the assembly that is the
target of the web project's target. (i.e. the .dll-product showing up
in bin\Debug or bin\Release after a compile and link).
$RemotionAssembly$ : a better name would be $RemotionAssemblyDirectories.
It is the path to the bin\Debug or bin\Release directory
where the re-motion framework's binary assemblies can be found.
$WxeEngine$ : where the re-call code generator WxeGen.exe can
be found. This has been introduced for developers who might want to
use an alternative WxeGen.exe. Since WxeGen.exe is part of
the re-motion framework, its location is always the same as that
of the other re-motion assemblies (see previous item, $RemotionAssembly$ .
$STRONG_SUPPLEMENT$ : a VERY important placeholder for specifying the
framework's version. re-motion, and by extension, uigen.exe insist
on complete strong names.
- NOT ENOUGH: Remotion.dll
- USE STRONG NAME: Remotion.dll, Version=1.13.6.2, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=fee00910d6e5f53b
$DomainProjectGuid$ : The project GUID you find in the domain project's
.csproj file. This GUID is included in the web project's (web client's)
.csproj file, but not checked by anyone. Use a syntactically valid Guid,
nobody will bother you.
$USER_APPNAME$ : a string with the display name of the
generated web application
$USER_DEFAULT_ASPX_TOPIC$ : a string to be shown on the default.aspx
page showing the Start link to aid the user (the string
usually says "To start the application, just click 'Start'")
This is harder to explain than to demonstrate. Click here and
you will easily understand it: FIXME
$USER_DEFAULT_STARTPAGES$ : an invocation of the re-call
function to be called when the user clicks "Start" (or equivalent).
(try it out with the online PhoneBook)
$USER_STORAGEPROVIDER$ : the name of the storage-provider, as
declared in the web project's Web.config file (generated by
uigen.exe)
$USER_CATALOGNAME$ : the name of the database (and the
identifier for the connection string) in the web project's
Web.config file (generated by uigen.exe) – this should be
the same as specified for dbschema.exe's App.Config,
explained here: using dbschema.exe
$USER_STATUSBAR$ : legacy placeholder, always set to "yes"
$USER_CLASSIC_APPSTYLE$ : legacy placeholder, always set to "no"

Please note that these placeholders are not the
only ones that exist. Placeholders are also extracted from
the domain assemblies as well. You can find a
list of these extracted placeholders at
https://at-vie-remotion/svn/Remotion/trunk/ObjectBinding/Web.CodeGenerator/Core/Placeholder.cs

What's more, the values of settings are mirrored by placeholders,
but those placeholders have slightly different names:

projectNamespaceRoot is mirrored by $PROJECT_ROOTNAMESPACE$
domainNamespaceRoot is mirrored by $DOMAIN_ROOTNAMESPACE$
templateRoot is mirrored by $ROOT_TEMPLATE_DIR$
targetRoot is mirrored by $ROOT_TARGET_DIR$

uigen.exe configuration file

Settings and <applicationGenerator template...>

Placeholders

See also