Computed values : seed.config

[lifaon74]

I re-open #968 because it's for me (and propably many users) still an important problem.

I work on windows 10, and computed values bother me a lot. Why :

• build.prod is not working with external libraries like ng2-translate, moment, etc... WE need to add them into SYSTEM_BUILDER_CONFIG.packages.
• some attributes like APP_CLIENT, APP_SRC are used to compute other attributes into seed.config.ts, so we can't edit it properly into project.config !

The consequences: everytime I pull ng2-seed (I do it frequently because I love your work), I have to merge the seed.config file and take care of any changes :(

A solution, as discussed into previous posts, could and should be to wrap all attributes into an init method called from the constructor of project.config.

Something like :

init() {
  // The purpose of init is to look if this.APP_SRC is already set (ex: from project.config). If not, set default value
  this.APP_SRC = (typeof this.APP_SRC === 'undefined') ? `src/${this.APP_CLIENT}` :  this.APP_SRC;

  // repeat for all attributes of seed.config
}

I sincerely hope, it will not be closed until resolved. Thanks.

[mgechev]

Yes, this is an important issue. What do you think about the decorator proposed by #968? Maybe init is a better solution since we don't introduce new syntax but only a convention.

[mgechev]

@lifaon74 let's use init method - seems cleaner, minimalistic with no extra syntax. Do you want to do the change, or I can take it next week?

[lifaon74]

I dont realy have time, if you don't have too, maybe I'lll take a full evening and do it. As you want.

[mgechev]

I played with this task today. The init approach is not very clean:

• We cannot provide default values (or if we want to, we need to introduce computations with different logic in seed.config.ts).
• We need to introduce the convention to always invoke the init method in project.config.ts.
• We will introduce breaking changes with the current way of adding packages (addPackageBundles).

Here is seed.config.ts for reference.

[lifaon74]

Hum,

1. I don't see why you could'nt provide default values ?
2. Why not ?

Another solution: what about a json config file ? Read by seed.config.ts which will extends its own attributes ? And then no more argv['base'], but something like argv['config-file']

[TheDonDope]

@lifaon74 yikes! i actually dig that idea of the .json config file! Reminds me of angular-cli.json they use with angular-cli. Are you interested in sketching out a more detailed proposal? :)