Generating options 🔧

Use mason allows you to either use the interactive questions, provide the paramaters on the command line or in a configuration json file.

We saw in the last step how to answer the questions for each. The full set of options are as follows:

Variable	Description	Default	Type
package	The name of the package this is generated into	scaffolding_sample	string
feature	The name of the feature	feature1	string
properties	string of the properties of this feature (string,bool,num)		string
generate_tests	Generate units tests using scaffolding-tests brick	true	boolean
generate_home	Generate home/main files tests using scaffolding-main brick	false	boolean

Each option typically takes a single word or true/false except the properties option. This option takes a string that has a special format to allow us to specify the properties of a domain entity/feature.

The format is as follows:

Type name=defaultValue

If there is more than one property then they are separed by a comma as follows:

String firstname=Scott, String lastname=Horn, int age=25, bool registered=false

If this is specified on the command line it needs to be in double quotes as follows:

--properties "String firstname=Scott, String lastname=Horn, int age=25, bool registered=false"

Currently the dart types supported for scaffolding are String, bool, int, double. More will be added in a future version.

We will look at the three ways to specify these when scaffolding next.

Interactive prompt

This was covered in the previous section and will add a quick summary example here:

mason make scaffolding
? What is the package name of your flutter project? (scaffolding_sample) static_scaffolding_sample
? What is your feature name (eg. Todo, DiaryProject, contact) ? (feature1) feature1
? Enter property list in the following format "String firstname=Your first name, String lastname=Your suranme, bool registered=false" ? String firstname=Your first name, String lastname=Your suranme, bool registered=false
? Do you want unit tests generated? n
? Do you want to generate the home page / main function ? (y/N) y

Command line parameters

To specific the same options as for the interactive prompt we would run the following:

mason make scaffolding --package static_scaffolding_sample --feature feature1 \
    --properties "String firstname=Your first name, String lastname=Your suranme, bool registered=false" \
    --generate-tests false --generate-home true

Configuration json file

The same for the configuration file with the namem config.json

{
  "package": "static_scaffolding_sample",
  "feature": "feature1",
  "generate-tests": false,
  "generate-home": true,
  "properties": "String firstname=Your first name, String lastname=Your suranme, bool registered=false"
}

and this is run as:

mason make scaffolding -c config.json

Test options

So far we have asked not to scaffold the unit tests. We will learn about automatically scaffolding our unit tests next.