Marten

Pre-Building Generated Types

TIP

Marten will fall back to generating dynamic types at runtime if the pre-generated type cannot be found in the entry assembly of the application. Marten will write warning to the Console when this happens if the TypeLoadMode.LoadFromPreBuiltAssembly option is configured.

Also see the blog post Dynamic Code Generation in Marten V4.

Marten V4 extensively uses runtime code generation backed by Roslyn runtime compilation for dynamic code. This is both much more powerful than source generators in what it allows us to actually do, but can have significant memory usage and “cold start” problems (seems to depend on exact configurations, so it’s not a given that you’ll have these issues). Fear not though, Marten v4 introduced a facility to “generate ahead” the code to greatly optimize the "cold start" and memory usage in production scenarios.

To enable the optimized cold start, there are a couple steps:

  1. Set StoreOptions.GeneratedCodeMode = TypeLoadMode.LoadFromPreBuiltAssembly in your DocumentStore configuration
  2. Use the Marten command line extensions for your application
  3. Add the LamarCodeGeneration.Commands Nuget to your main entry project. This has the necessary command line functionality to generate and export the dynamic source code.
  4. Register all document types, compiled query types, and event store projections upfront in your DocumentStore configuration
  5. In your deployment process, you'll need to generate the Marten code with dotnet run -- codegen write before actually compiling the build products that will be deployed to production

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In the near future, Marten will probably be extended with better auto-discovery features for document types, compiled queries, and event projections to make this feature easier to use.

As an example, here is the Marten configuration from the project we used to test the pre-generated source code model:

public class Program
{
    public static Task<int> Main(string[] args)
    {
        return CreateHostBuilder(args).RunOaktonCommands(args);
    }

    public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args)
    {
        return Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
            .ConfigureServices((hostContext, services) =>
            {
                services.AddMarten(opts =>
                {
                    opts.AutoCreateSchemaObjects = AutoCreate.All;
                    opts.DatabaseSchemaName = "cli";
                    opts.Connection(ConnectionSource.ConnectionString);

                    // This is important, setting this option tells Marten to
                    // *try* to use pre-generated code at runtime
                    opts.GeneratedCodeMode = TypeLoadMode.LoadFromPreBuiltAssembly;

                    opts.Schema.For<Activity>().AddSubClass<Trip>();

                    // You have to register all persisted document types ahead of time
                    // RegisterDocumentType<T>() is the equivalent of saying Schema.For<T>()
                    // just to let Marten know that document type exists
                    opts.RegisterDocumentType<Target>();
                    opts.RegisterDocumentType<User>();

                    // If you use compiled queries, you will need to register the
                    // compiled query types with Marten ahead of time
                    opts.RegisterCompiledQueryType(typeof(FindUserByAllTheThings));

                    // Register all event store projections ahead of time
                    opts.Projections.Add(new TripAggregationWithCustomName(), ProjectionLifecycle.Inline);
                    opts.Projections.Add(new DayProjection(), ProjectionLifecycle.Async);
                    opts.Projections.Add(new DistanceProjection(), ProjectionLifecycle.Async);

                    opts.Projections.Add(new SimpleAggregate(), ProjectionLifecycle.Inline);

                    // This is actually important to register "live" aggregations too for the code generation
                    opts.Projections.SelfAggregate<SelfAggregatingTrip>(ProjectionLifecycle.Live);

                    opts.Projections.AsyncMode = DaemonMode.Solo;
                });
            });
    }
}

snippet source | anchor

Okay, after all that, there should be a new command line option called codegen for your project. Assuming that you have Oakton wired up as your command line parser, you can preview all the code that Marten would generate for the known document types, compiled queries, and the event store support with this command:

dotnet run -- codegen preview

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Because the generated code can easily get out of sync with the Marten configuration at development time, the Marten team recommends ignoring the generated code files in your source control so that stale generated code is never accidentally migrated to production.

To write the generated code to your project directory, use:

dotnet run -- codegen write

This will build all the dynamic code and write it to the /Internal/Generated/ folder of your project. The code will be in just two files, Events.cs for the event store support and DocumentStorage.cs for everything related to document storage. If you like, you can reformat that code and split the types to different files if you want to browse that code -- but remember that it's generated code and that pretty well always means that it's pretty ugly code.

To clean out the generated code, use:

dotnet run -- codegen delete

To just prove out that the code generation is valid, use this command:

dotnet run -- codegen test