Building a Custom Schema Provider for SchemaExplorer

If you have a custom data source that looks like a database (that is, it exposes data in tables and columns, perhaps with indexes, views, and commands), you may find it convenient to hook your data source into SchemaExplorer. If you do this, users will be able to use the standard SchemaExplorer user interface components to retrieve data from your data source, and you can use the SchemaExplorer object model to work with the data in your templates.

You can integrate your own data with SchemaExplorer by building a custom Schema Provider. In this tutorial we will show you how to build and debug a custom Schema Provider.

You can find the source code for all of CodeSmith Generators' Schema Providers in your extracted templates folder. The default template folder is located in the My Documents folder. You can find all of the extracted Schema Provider source code in the following directory: Documents\CodeSmith Generator\Samples\<Version>\Projects\CSharp\