[FEATURE REQUEST] Template Code Gen

[Lachee]

It would be awesome if the code generation was able to understand templates.
At the moment, it just puts it as a TemplateContainer, but i propose it does 2 things:

1. Creates the template container field with a Template suffix
2. Creates a typed field without said suffix and initializes it in the assign.

For example, it would go from:

    partial class ProvinceEditor
    {
        private Label title;
        private TemplateContainer areaDropdown;
    
        protected void AssignQueryResults(VisualElement root)
        {
            title = root.Q<Label>("Title");
            areaDropdown = root.Q<TemplateContainer>("AreaDropdown");
        }
    }

To:

    partial class ProvinceEditor
    {
        private Label title;
        private TemplateContainer areaDropdownTemplate;
        private AreaDropdown areaDropdown;
    
        protected void AssignQueryResults(VisualElement root)
        {
            title = root.Q<Label>("Title");
            areaDropdownTemplate = root.Q<TemplateContainer>("AreaDropdown");
            areaDropdown = new AreaDropdown(areaDropdownTemplate);
        }
    }

Not entirely sure if the template is even required to be exposed outside of the AssignQueryResults function.

[ErnSur]

Hi @Lachee
Do you have any ideas on how would that feature work exactly?
Some things to consider with this.

• Templates are not bound to any C# type.
• Type from .gen.cs can be used.
• To create a new instance of a type in the AssignQueryResults this type needs a parameterless constructor. This would require modifying the interface of all generated scripts, or...
• Maybe this system should create a field with more specific type only if this type has a parameterless constructor.
  • In this case the code-gen scripts would not compile if later users decides to remove parameterless constructor. Should this be something to worry about?
• Type from .gen.cs also requires a AssignQueryResults to run for its initialisation, so a constructor with VisualElement parameter is probably more appropriate than a parameterless one.

Example logic:
If we need to create a field for a TemplateContainer

• See if its UXML has a reference to .gen.cs file
  • See if a type from this file has a Type(VisualElement root) constructor
  • if it does, use this type instead of TemplateContainer

I would also like to see a project where this feature is actually useful. In my experience all of the .gen.cs types I used required initialisation. For this reason I most often used constructors with more parameters.

[ErnSur]

No further input- closing