Creating a ReSharper Macro

Thursday, October 17, 2013

I wanted to get R# to do a little typing for me so that I can more easily add new blog posts.

A new post looks like this:

new Post
{
    Title = "Creating a ReSharper Macro",
    Slug = "creating-a-resharper-macro",
    FileName = "creating-a-resharper-macro.markdown",
    PublishedAtCst = DateTime.Parse("October 17, 2013"),
},

The slug and filename are independently adjustable for flexibility, but they usually start out as a derivative of whatever I'm going to name the post.

I created a R# Live Template that looks like this:

new Post
{
    Title = "$title$",
    Slug = "$slug$",
    FileName = "$slug$.markdown",
    PublishedAtCst = System.DateTime.Parse("$date$"),
},

This is great. When I activate the template, I get a chance to type for each $variable$ . So I can type $title$ , then $slug$ , which gets used on two lines, and finally $date$ .

For $date$ , I hooked it to a R# Macro that formats today's date.

For $slug$ , I want the title to be lowercased and the spaces to be replaced with hyphens. Unfortunately, there wasn't a built in macro that did this.

I found a post about extending macros that shows how to create your own macro. The post a bit confusing and out of date for R# 7+.

Fortunately, I found a couple examples which gave me some much needed hints to write and install the macro.

In addition to what's outlined in the blog post, here are some key steps:

When you create your project, add a reference to JetBrains.ReSharper.Feature.Services.dll from the R# program files bin directory. R# itself will then be able to pull in the rest of the dependencies from the bin folder as needed.
You specify that you will transform another variable in the template through the Parameters property and then manipulate that value in EvaluateQuickResult.
To install your plugin, put it in user app data, NOT the R# bin directory. It will be something like: C:\Users<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\JetBrains\ReSharper\v8.0\Plugins\<YOUR_PLUGIN>\
Each plugin gets it's own folder
If the plugins directory doesn't exist, create it.

It would be nice if everything needed to write a plugin/macro was available via nuget. It would also be nice if there was a "import plugin" feature in the R# options so you didn't have to find the right directory.

If JetBrains wanted to get really crazy, they could create a Publish Plugin feature that allowed quick and easy social code sharing.

I put the source code for the macro on GitHub.

If you see a mistake in the post *or* you want to make a comment, please submit an edit.

You can also contact me and I'll post the comment.

1 Comments...

Matt Ellis • 12 years ago

Something like https://resharper-plugins.jetbr..., you mean? :)

ReSharper plugins can be wrapped up as NuGet packages. You can find out more here: https://confluence.jetbrains.co...

and there's more documentation on macros here: https://confluence.jetbrains.co...

We're working on something for NuGet, but for now, you need to download the sdk from the website.
Nice post!
Matt

Kijana Woodard

Software Minimalism

Creating a ReSharper Macro

Thursday, October 17, 2013