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Topic: ApiGear Core

Code Generation

The generate command is used to generate code from a API description. The generation is based on SDK templates which are available from a central registry.

Quick Code Generation​

The apigear command line tool can be used to generate code from an API definition. The following example shows how to generate code from the a demo API definition.

// demo.idl
module demo 1.0

interface Counter {
    count: int
    increment()
    decrement()
}

For example to generate a C++ 14 SDK from the demo API definition just run the following command.

apigear generate expert -i demo.idl -o tmp -t apigear-io/template-cpp14

The expert mode is used to generate code from an IDL file. The -i option specifies the input file. The -o option specifies the output directory. The -t option specifies the template to use. The template-cpp14 template is used to generate C++ 14 code.

If the template does not point to a local directory the template will be downloaded from the template registry and installed in a local cache directory.

By default the latest version of the template is used. To use a specific version of the template add the version to the template name using the @<version> syntax.

Solution based Code Generation​

To streamline the code generation you can create a configuration file called solution. The following example shows how to create a configuration file for the C++ 14 SDK.

# solution.yaml
layers:
  - name: cpp14
    inputs:
      - demo.idl
    output: tmp
    template: template-cpp14

The layers section defines the layers of the solution. Each layer defines a set of inputs, an output directory and a template. The inputs section defines the input files for the layer. The output section defines the output directory for the layer. The template section defines the template to use for the layer.

To generate the code from the solution just run the following command.

apigear generate solution solution.yaml