ReSharper Property Expansion Live Template

One thing I liked about CodeRush is that it came with several property expansion templates. However, ReSharper comes with a powerful template expansion editor for creating your own templates similar to what Whidbey has. I took it upon myself to create one for ReSharper. I hope you find it useful. There’s also a slight bug with this template in ReSharper that I will report to them (via this blog entry) and hope they fix.

To add this template, go to the ReSharper menu and click Options. Select the Live Templates node and click New. A window for creating a Live Template will appear. Fill it out as below.

Figure 1: Live Template Editor.

Now, to use the template, type the letters “prop” (sans quotes) and hit the TAB key. This should expand to the following:

Figure 2: Specifying the property type.

Don’t let all the red squigglies worry you. As you can see in the figure above, the word TYPE is highlighted by a red box. Type in the type of the property and hit tab. This will then take you to the second argument of the template, the name for the private member. In the figure below, I chose string as the type.

Figure 3: Specifying the private property member name.

At this point, you can type in the name of the private member that will hold the value of your property. Since I like to preface my private members with an underscore, you’ll notice that the underscore is part of the template and is not typed in as part of the PRIVATEMEMBER argument.

As you are typing, you’ll notice that public property name matches whatever you type for the private member, but with the first character capitalized as in Figure 4.

Figure 5 Look ma, I can name a property!

Bug Alert! at this point, do not hit the TAB key. Even though we’ve set that the PROPERTYNAME is not editable, when you hit TAB after typing in the private member name, the cursor is taken to the end of the property expansion, but the PROPERTYNAME is removed. See figure 5. Instead, you’re going to have to hit the down arrow a few times.

Figure 5 Where’s my property name!?

Conclusion
Hopefully they fix this in the next version, or provide a workaround or guideline for how a template like this should be built. I also wish there was an easy way for me to export a template so that I can share them easily. In any case, you can probably see all sorts of potential for these live templates. It’s great for company specific boilerplate. If you have a greate template, post it in my comments section and I’ll try to compile them.