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Builder Generator

This is a .Net Source Generator designed to add "Builders" to your projects. Builders are an object creation pattern, similar to the Object Mother pattern. Object Mothers and Builders are most commonly used to create objects for testing, but they can be used anywhere you want "canned" objects.

For more complete documentation, please see the documentation site or the raw documentation source.

Known Issues

This project has moved to the .Net 6 version of source generators, which unfortuntely means that it's incompatible with Visual Studio 2019. It's also breaking the GitHub build pipeline at the moment. It all seems to work just fine in VS2022 though. If you're stuck on .Net 5 and VS2019, you can always use the v1.x series, although its usage is different.

Installation

BuilderGenerator is installed as an analyzer via NuGet package (https://www.nuget.org/packages/BuilderGenerator/). You can find it through the "Manage NuGet Packages" dialog in Visual Studio, or from the command line.

Install-Package BuilderGenerator

Usage

After installation, create a partial class to define your builder in. Decorate it with the BuilderFor attribute, specifying the type of class that the builder is meant to build (e.g. [BuilderFor(typeof(Foo))]. Define any factory and helper methods in this partial class. Meanwhile, another partial class definition will be auto-generated which contains all the "boring" parts such as the backing fields and "with" methods.

Version History

• v2.4.0

  • Test code reorganization
  • Moved WithObject from the base class to the generated builder class
  • Added WithValuesFrom method to shallow clone an example object.

• v2.3.0

  • Major caching and performance improvements
  • Internal code cleanup
  • Conversion of templates to embedded resources

• v2.2.0

  • Changed generated file extension to .g.cs

• v2.0.7

  • Fixed #13, NetStandard2.0 compatibility

• v2.0.6

  • Fixed #12, Generated files now marked with auth-generated header

• v2.0.5

  • Fixed #14, duplicate properties

• v2.0.3

  • Attempting to fix NuGet packaging problems

• v2.0.2

  • Setters for base class properties rendering properly

• v2.0.1

  • Improved error handling

• v2.0.0

  • Updated to .Net 6 and IIncrementalGenerator (See note above about incompatibility with VS2019)
  • Changed usage pattern from marking target classes with attributes to marking partial builder classes

• v1.2

  • Solution reorganization
  • Version number synchronization
  • Automated build pipeline

• v1.0

  • First major release

• v0.5

  • Public beta
  • Working NuGet package
  • Customizable templates

Roadmap

• Read-only collection support in default templates
• Attribute-less generation of partial classes
• Completed documentation
• Unit tests for generation components

Attributions

The BuilderGenerator logo includes tools by John Caserta from the Noun Project.