Adam Tybor’s Blog

I love Ayende’s Rhino projects, especially his NHibernate Query Generator (NHQG). Since on most of my active development I am use NHibernate, Castle, and Rhino.Commons trunks, I keep nhqg in a tools directory and I was using a PreBuild command to generate the query builders. This had the negative impact of always rebuilding my domain project, even if a change was only made in another project. So, here is an msbuild snippet to generate my query builders only when my NHibernate mapping files change.

<ItemGroup>
 <NH-Mappings Include=“DomainQuery***.hbm.xml” />
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name=“BeforeBuild”
 Inputs=“@(NH-Mappings)”
 Outputs=“@(NH-Mappings -> ‘%(RelativeDir)Generated%(Filename).cs’)”>
  <Exec Command=“$(SolutionDir)..toolsnhqgNHQG.exe /lang:cs /files:%22$(ProjectDir)DomainQuery*.hbm.xml%22 /out:%22$(ProjectDir)DomainQueryGenerated%22″ />
</Target>

The Inputs and Ouputs of the Target is what allows msbuild to conditionally run the task. I use an msbuild transform to convert my mapping file name into the nhqg generated file name. Also, notice the %22 in command. This is the only way I could figure out how to pass quotes to a cmd inside of msbuild.

And the confirmation…

Target BeforeBuild:
  Skipping target "BeforeBuild" because all output files are up-to-date with respect to the input files.
  Input files: DomainQueryPost.hbm.xml;DomainQueryContributor.hbm.xml;DomainQueryTag.hbm.xml;DomainQueryItem.hbm.xml;DomainQueryBlog.hbm.xml;DomainQueryTagStat.hbm.xml
  Output files: DomainQueryGeneratedItem.hbm.cs;DomainQueryGeneratedTagStat.hbm.cs;DomainQueryGeneratedContributor.hbm.cs;DomainQueryGeneratedBlog.hbm.cs;DomainQueryGeneratedPost.hbm.cs;DomainQueryGeneratedTag.hbm.cs

Happy Building

Tags: .net, msbuild, nhibernate, nhqg, rhino