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How to escape quotation marks in Enterprise Architect Code Generation Template

I want to give enumeration values a further description. Therefore I'm adding a custom Tagged Value to the attributes of the enumeration called Description, if a description shall be provided. The goal is, to add a custom C# attribute to the tagged enumeration attribute during code generation, but only if such a Tagged Value exists. Therefore I need to edit the code generation template for Attribute Declaration. Currently it works using:

$hasDescription = %attTag:"Description" ? "true" : "false"%
%if $hasDescription == "true"%
[Description(%qt%%attTag:"Description"%%qt%)]
%endIf%

which gives me the desired output. But if there are quotation marks in the value, it breaks the output code file. It won't compile. Therefore I need to replace/escape all quotation marks in the value field of the Tagged Value. I tried the following (in various combinations):

%REPLACE(attTag:"Description", "\"", "\\\"")%
%REPLACE(attTag:"Description", """", "\\""")%
%REPLACE(attTag:"Description", "%qt%", "%sl%%qt%")%
%REPLACE(attTag:"Description", %qt%, %sl%%qt%)%

Note: %qt% is used to insert ", %sl% is used to insert \ (reference)

None of them works. Either the string as it is will be inserted into the generated code file or nothing happens to the quotation marks in the value of Tagged Value.

So is there a way to escape those characters to be able to replace them in a string within a Code Template?

Using Enterprise Architect 13.5.1351

Question asked first on SE Software Engineering

Solution

  • I looked through the other templates provided and finally found the solution after some more fiddling. The macro take either some text in quotation marks or variables as parameters. Since using the escape sequences directly in the REPLACE macro didn't work, I tried assigning them to variables beforehand:

    $qt = %qt%
$escape = %sl% + %qt%
$description = %REPLACE(attTag:"Description", $qt, $escape)%

    That's it. Finally works. It is important to add the + between %sl% and %qt% on the second line, even though the documentation on Code Template Syntax > Literal Text states it otherwise. $escape = %sl%%qt% does not work, as it yields me just a \ without the ".

    The variable $description is not necessary, but added for readability.