ianovir/CLIM_dotnet

Command line interface menu engine for .NET core

CLIM for .NET

Command line interface menu (CLIM) engine for .NET core and .NET Framework offers a very simple system to manage UI menus via the cli.

Motivation

CLIM may be useful when prototyping core libraries in their early stage, in absence of advanced GUI yet. For example, when you are developing core component for multi-platform environments and you need to use or distribute it in its early stage.

Download

You can download the last compiled version of CLIM from the releases page, or import it from nuget.

Nuget

For .NET core projects:

PM> Install-Package CLIM

For .NET Framework projects:

PM> Install-Package CLIM_FW

.NET CLI

For .NET core projects:

> dotnet add package CLIM

For .NET Framework projects:

> dotnet add package CLIM_FW

Usage

See the Program.cs inside the CLIM Demo project for a simple example.

Overview

The main components of CLIM are:

• Engine
• Menu
• Entry
• Streams

Engine

Engine is the main component organizing menus, printing to IOutputStream and reading from InputStream. Basically, an Engine wraps a Stack collection of menus and allows navigation across them.

To create a new engine:

Engine engine = new Engine("CLIM DEMO");

To start the engine:

engine.Start();

To wait for the engine to terminate its execution (blocking call):

engine.Wait();

Menu

A Menu is a list of entries.

To create a menu:

Menu mainMenu = new Menu("Main menu", engine);

Then add as many entries as you want:

mainMenu.AddEntry(newEntry);

Or add a sub-menu as entry:

Menu secondMenu = new Menu("Second menu", "cancel");
//...
mainMenu.AddSubMenu(secondMenu);

Finally add the menu to the engine:

engine.AddOnTop(mainMenu);

A manu can easily be created with:

Menu myMenu = engine.BuildMenuOnTop("Menu title");

Entry

An Entry represents an option the user can choose. You need to implement the OnAction() action of an entry in order to specify its action.

To create an Entry:

Entry newEntry = new Entry("Entry name", () =>{
		//implement entry's action...
	}
);

or by using Menu:

Entry newEntry = menu.AddEntry("Entry name", ()=>{/**do stuff**/});

Change Entry's visibility to hide/show it on menu list.

Streams

CLIM's Stream is an object used for streaming input and output data. By default, the Engine uses ScannerInputStream and SystemOutputStream which uses the standard Console. You can define your custom streams by implementing the InputStream and IOutputStream classes.

It is possible to assign custom streams to the engine:

engine.InputStream = customInputStream;
engine.OutStream = customOutputStream;

Copyright

Copyright(c) 2021 Sebastiano Campisi - ianovir.com. Read LICENSE file for more details.