This POC was created to investigate what would be required to enable the use of MS DI extensions with BEEF. In addition using an alternative off the shelf code generation library has been included as part of the POC.

The goal is to enable the use of DI so that we can get the benefits of DI. To make that happen the following changes were made.

Data service layer generated as a non-static so that it can be used with DI.

With MS DI types can only have a single public constructor. To allow for a custom constructor in the custom partial the gen'ed constructor either needs to be omitted or made private. The following code then works.

public partial class PersonDataSvc
{
    public PersonDataSvc(IPersonData data, IConfiguration configuration) : this(data)
    {
    }
}

Service collection extension methods created to aid in the MS DI setup.

The goal is to see if an alternative code generator could help make BEEF easier to maintain.

Another goal was to see what effort would be required to change the code generator.

Handlebars is used for code generation as it is simple. The configration of the code generation process though can in theory support multiple code generation libraries and is not limited to one.

Handlebars has limited logic controls so requires a richer model to bind to. This is seen as a beneift though as all logic is code based so can be easily maintained and debugged.

The main entity model has reasonable explicit data for all classes generated:

Entity
- EntityClass
- DataInterface
- DataClass
- DataServiceInterface
- DataServiceClass
- ManagerInterface
- ManagerClass
- ControllerClass

Other models can be created and used as required.

This is a work in progress, there are many missing features, especially around data layer and service agents.

DI was used to configure the code generation. The intent was to try and make it easier to extend the code generation process to allow for other artifacts to be generated, e.g. markdown files, mermaid diagrams.

Addition generators can be added by projects if required, along with custom models.

Uses MS configuration extension to allow generator config to be easily overridden. E.g. templates, output targets, other properties.

YAML was used for the entity config. Due to the separation of config loading and model creation, in theory the format used could be user definable.

The option to enable/disable partial classes was added. Originally this was an idea to tie partial classes to private constructors (for enabling DI), but that idea failed but the concept was left in place. One advantage is that if partials are not required the generated code is cleaner.

There are some differences to nullable types.

• Auto set operation based on type
• Auto set Beef entity interfaces