Questions

In the template configuration you can define questions that Architect should ask before the files can be written to the target. The answers to those questions are stored in the context and are therefore available in the context.

You can ask various types of questions, each with a concrete use-case.

The question names must be (possibly dot-delimited) identifiers, so that they can be used in Handlebars templates. By specifying multiple dot-delimited identifiers you can create nested objects in the context.

Multiple occurrences of previously specified question names will overwrite prior ones without warning.

Example:

You define questions with the following names:

• author.name
• author.email
• somethingElse

Result in the context:

{
  ...,
  "author": {
    "name": ...,
    "email": ...
  },
  "somethingElse": ...
}

Default Values

You can also specify default values for all your questions. Specifying a default value makes the question optional and you can proceed without entering a custom value.

Identifier

Ask for an identifier, i.e. a String that can only consist of a limited subset of characters, or multiple such strings concatenated by dot (.) characters.

Format:

^[a-zA-Z_$][a-zA-Z0-9_$]*$

A possible use-case for this question type can be to ask for a class name for an application's main class or a package name for Java.

Default Values

You can specify any value as a default value that would fit the specified format.

Option

A simple yes or no question. This will store a Boolean in the context.

Example:

You specify yes for the question insertLogStatements.

Result in the context:

{
  ...,
  "insertLogStatements": true
}

This question type is useful when you want to present the user with a binary choice, e.g. whether to generate a .gitignore in the target directory.

Default Values

You can specify a boolean value as the default value (true or false)

Selection

Useful where you want to offer a predefined list of values to choose from. The selected value(s) will be created as properties in the context and have the value true.

You can configure a selection question to accept only one or multiple (multi) values to be selected.

As those values will be added as properties they must match a certain format:

^[a-zA-Z_$][a-zA-Z0-9_$]*$

Example:

The question (whichOnes) defines three values: value1, value2, and value3. You select value1 and value2.

Result in the context:

{
  ...,
  "whichOnes": {
    "value1": true,
    "value2": true
  }
}

A possible use-case for this type of question is to define several features a user could choose to enable when using a template, e.g. whether to use logging statements, or to include a certain dependency.

Default Values

Depending on whether multi-selection is enabled you can either specify a single string as the default value or an array of strings.

Text

This question type allows you to ask for arbitrary text to store in the context. No format is enforced for answers.

Possible use-cases for this question type can be to ask for a person's full name or an email address.

Default Values

You can set any string as the default value.

Custom

You can define a custom regular expression to validate the input. Please keep in mind that the regular expression will look for the shortest matching string, so you must specify anchors (^, $) if you want to match the entire input.

Architect uses this implementation.

Default Values

You can set any string that matches the Regular expression as the default value.