Customize Reverse Engineer Code First - EF Power Tool Enhancement

Do you know you can customize the code generation for EF 6.x code first? If you are surprised then you can read a beginning guide here about the EF power tool to get more insights into the code generation process.

What can I customize using EF power tools?

You can customize the class names, attributes, methods and anything related to code that lies in your database context, entity or mapping classes.

Why would I need such customization?

Sometimes you may want to prefix/suffix the names of entities according to your requirement or may be putting in some custom attributes etc.

What this blog is about?

This blog will not cover how to use the EF power tools. I already mentioned it in the start of the post about the tutorial where you can learn about it.

In this blog we’ll talk about some enhancements which will make the tool a bit more flexible for generating classes with directory hierarchy based on namespace. Well this sentence went bit too long. So I’ll start step by step understanding the issue and what could be the proposed fix:

I have encountered a couple of questions in forums that the EF code templates are only generating code in a particular designated directory. Below are the files which you would get after installing the EFPowerTool.



Now, if you have already existing Code first in the project and you want to use the EF code template to customize them, y end up having the below directory hierarchy after code generation. Well you have to change the namespaces and directory hierarchy according to your existing structure of code first classes.



After doing a bit of research in the EF6.x source code, I found that the Model and Mapping directories including the namespaces are hardcoded in the code. To fix this problem I had to understand the whole process of code generation. So aftera few hours of research I figured out that the Custom code template files have access the EfTextTemplateHostobject via Host property.

Also I found the below properties in the EfTextTemplateHost object which can be used to change the namespace for code generation.