C#•2y ago

❔ Properly including XML templates in a class library

I'm writing a library for generating .epub files. Since they're just glorified zips with XML files inside, I'll need to generate that XML somehow. The easiest way is to just have some templates with the XML and placeholders, and run a .Replace() on them or use some templating library. Question is, how do I store those templates properly? Using triple-quoted string constants would be the easiest, but some of the XML is quite large. I could just store loose files and load them with File.ReadAllTextAsync(), but not sure how well that'd work in the class lib context. Not to mention, I'd like those templates to be available at all times, I'd rather avoid reading them from the filesystem each time I want to generate an epub. Using DI somehow is an idea, I could read the templates once and inject them as a singleton or something, but how do I even make DI work in a class lib, not knowing if the user of the library even uses DI in the first place? I'd consider source generators and just reading files on compile time and adding them to some Template const in each class that needs it, but source generators can't read files... Any ideas would be welcome

13 Replies

reflectronic•2y ago

i would store them as embedded resources. it is the simplest option assuming that you are the one creating all of the templates

AngiusOP•2y ago

Ye, I'm making them all Any up to date docs on embedded resources? Do you still need resgen?

reflectronic•2y ago

no, that's for using resx. that's much more complicated than what you want here i mean, if they need to be localized, then maybe that's what you want but adding an embedded resource is

<EmbeddedResource Include="Templates\**\*.xml" />

<EmbeddedResource Include="Templates\**\*.xml" />

and using them at runtime is

var stream = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream("name-of-embeddedresource");
// you can use StreamReader to get the string out of this to do your replacement

var stream = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream("name-of-embeddedresource");
// you can use StreamReader to get the string out of this to do your replacement