AndroidX/util/Xamarin.AndroidBinderator

Xamarin.AndroidBinderator

An engine to generate Xamarin Binding projects from Maven repositories with a JSON config and razor templates.

Features

• Dependency chain automatically inferred from Maven
• Simple JSON Config file to list Maven artifacts to generate binding projects for

Usage

JSON Config File

The JSON Config file (config.json) should contain information about all of the Maven artifacts you would like to generate binding projects for, as well as some basic information about templates and file paths.

Here is what a basic config file might look like:

[
    {
        "mavenRepositoryType" : "Google",
        "slnFile" : "generated/AndroidSupport.sln",
        "downloadExternalsWithFullName" : true,
        "additionalProjects" : [
            "source/buildtasks/support-annotations/Support-Annotations-BuildTasks.csproj"
        ],
        "templates" : [
            {
                "templateFile": "source/AndroidSupportTargets.cshtml",
                "outputFileRule" : "generated/{groupid}.{artifactid}/{nugetid}.targets"
            },
            {
                "templateFile": "source/AndroidSupportProject.cshtml",
                "outputFileRule" : "generated/{groupid}.{artifactid}/{groupid}.{artifactid}.csproj"
            }
        ],
        "artifacts" : [
            {
                "groupId" : "com.android.support",
                "artifactId" : "support-annotations",
                "version" : "28.0.0-beta01",
                "nugetId" : "Xamarin.Android.Support.Annotations"
            },
            {
                "groupId" : "com.android.support",
                "artifactId" : "support-compat",
                "version" : "28.0.0-beta01",
                "nugetId" : "Xamarin.Android.Support.Compat"
            },
        ]
    }
]

Basic Template values

You can see the basics like mavenRepositoryType (which can be Google, Url or Directory - if using Url or Directory you must also specify mavenRepositoryLocation containing the url or folder of the repo).

You can also specify a slnFile to be generated, relative to the base path you specify either in the config file ("basePath" : "/some/path/") or when calling BinderateAsync(..).

Templates

The templates section is a list of razor template files to run for each artifact, as well as an output file name rule, which can contain the placeholders: {groupid}, {artifactid}, {name} (project name), and {nugetid}.

Artifacts

You must add an entry for each Maven artifact you want to generate bindings for. This should contain the Maven Group ID, Maven Artifact ID, Maven version to bind, and the NuGet Package ID to generate.

The config file also should contain Maven artifact information for any dependencies required by the bindings to be generated, which you do not also want to generate bindings for. You must specify the Maven groupId, artifactId, and version you want to binderate,

For example if you have a Maven artifact you want Binderate, which depends on Android Support v4, you can specify this artifact in the config file like this:

{
    "groupId" : "com.android.support",
    "artifactId" : "support-v4",
    "version" : "26.1.0",
    "nugetId" : "Xamarin.Android.Support.v4",
    "nugetVersion" : "27.0.2",
    "dependencyOnly" : true
},

Notice we specified that this is a dependencyOnly, which means it won't have a binding generated for it, and we specified a nugetVersion to use in the PackageReference, even though the version is different, since this is the version that the maven artifact depending on this package is looking for to satisfy the dependency.

Creating Template Files

Templates are created with Razor syntax. You can specify multiple template files, and each template file will be run once per artifact to have bindings generated for, as per your JSON config file.

The @Model passed into each template looks like this:

@Model

• string Id
• string Name
• string MavenGroupId
• string NuGetPackageId
• string NuGetVersion
• string AssemblyName
• string[] ProjectReferences
• MavenArtifactModel[] MavenArtifacts
• NuGetDependencyModel[] NuGetDependencies
• BindingConfig Config

@MavenArtifactModel

• string MavenGroupId
• string MavenArtifactId
• string MavenArtifactVersion
• string MavenArtifactPackaging
• string MavenArtifactMd5
• string MavenArtifactSha256
• string DownloadedArtifact
• string ProguardFile

@NuGetDependencyModel

• bool IsProjectReference
• string NuGetPackageId
• string NuGetVersion
• MavenArtifactModel MavenArtifact

Running the Binderator

You can pull the binderator in as a nuget package. Once this is done, it's trivial to run:

var engine = new AndroidBinderator.Engine();
await engine.BinderateAsync("/path/to/config.json", "/path/to/base/output/");