uigen.exe configuration file

Owned by reinhard reinhard (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jan 21, 2010Version comment
4 min read

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 in the SVN source

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 $ROOT_TARGET_DIR$
See also

This tech-note explains what uigen.exe does: What uigen.exe does