I’ve been working on an internal project which uses Endjin’s Templify. For those not familiar with Templify, it’s a handy piece of software which tokenises (or templifies, to use their parlance) keywords within solutions such that they can be used as templates for new solutions. What I’ve been working on is a server-based implementation of Templify that works with our CI server to allow us to centrally maintain templates. This ensures everyone’s working with the latest version and avoids having to update template packages locally. I ran into a couple of interesting points while doing this, which I think are worth documenting.

Choose tokens carefully

I had initially used the same word for the package name and the token. This was pleasingly consistent, however it caused Templify to break. The problem turned out to be with the manifest.xml file that Templify generates. This file lists all files included in the template along with some Templify metadata, such as its package name and tokens. This file is itself tokenised as part of the Templify process, so if the package name is the same as the token, it too gets tokenised. This results in Templify being unable to deploy the package after its creation. So the lesson here is to make sure the package name is not the same (or does not contain) any of the tokens.

Configuration path

This one isn’t something that’s likely to cause a problem for general usage of Templify, but it was a pain for me. The installer for Templify offers no option to install for all users, and only installs for the current user. This presented a problem when running on our CI server under credentials specially created for the purpose, as Templify will attempt to read its configuration from the current user’s profile directory. Unfortunately the configuration file doesn’t exist for that user profile, but instead of failing completely it gives rise to some odd behaviour.

What happens is this: Templify maintains a list of files to exclude in its configuration file. These files are deleted from the package prior to tokenisation. However if the configuration file is missing, it reads the exclusion list as string.empty, which results in all tokenised files and directories being deleted as exclusions. Whoops! Fortunately this is easily remedied by copying the configuration from the profile it was installed under to the profile of the user you want to run it under. The default location is C:\Users\$USER\AppData\Roaming\endjin\Templify\config