Creating aspects
This chapter provides a comprehensive guide on how to build your own aspects. If you're only interested in using pre-existing aspects, you may initially skip this chapter. However, we recommend revisiting this chapter at a later stage to gain a deeper understanding of how Metalama operates.
Benefits
Boilerplate elimination: Utilizing the code transformation capabilities of aspects allows you to generate boilerplate code at compile time, offering the following benefits:
- Less code to write: The aspect takes care of generating boilerplate code, eliminating the need for you to write it.
- Clean and readable code: Your source code becomes cleaner and more concise, making it easier to understand.
- Fewer bugs: The reduction in code volume and increase in clarity is likely to result in fewer bugs.
- Deduplication: Cross-cutting patterns are defined in one place, meaning that any changes or fixes need only be applied once, rather than across multiple occurrences in your code base.
Code validation: Aspects can be used to create custom attributes that validate code. For further details and associated benefits, refer to Validating code from an aspect.
- Code fixes: Aspects can also be used to provide code fixes that appear in the refactoring or lightbulb menu. For more information, see Building IDE interactions.
In this chapter
This chapter includes the following articles:
| Article | Description |
|---|---|
| Writing T# templates | This section provides guidance on how to create dynamic code templates. |
| Transforming code | This section explains how to create aspects that perform advanced code modifications using the complete API. |
| Reporting and suppressing diagnostics | This section outlines how to report errors, warnings, and information messages and suppress warnings. See Reporting and suppressing diagnostics for more details. |
| Injecting dependencies into aspects | This section describes how an aspect can utilize a dependency and retrieve it from the container. |
| Building IDE interactions | This article discusses how to create live templates, code fixes, and refactorings. |
| Adding child aspects | This section explains how an aspect can add other aspects and how child aspects can become aware of their parents. |
| Applying aspects to derived types | This section provides insight into how to automatically apply an aspect to all declarations derived from its direct targets. |
| Ordering aspects | This article describes how to order aspect classes to ensure the correct execution order when multiple aspects are applied to the same declaration. |
| Configuration and troubleshooting | This article explains how an aspect can expose and consume configuration properties or a configuration API. |
| Testing aspects | This section provides guidance on how to test aspects. |
| Debugging aspects | This article explains how to debug aspects. |