Question

I have a decent sized set of data that needs to be stored in an active record. In order to prepopulate the form fields on the page, I have already written the following code:

Device device = new Device(DeviceID); // device is simply the active record  txtDeviceName.Text = device.Name; txtNotes.Text = device.Notes; txtHostName.Text = device.Hostname; txtAssetTag.Text = device.AssetTag; txtSerialNumber.Text = device.SerialNumber; // snip... the list goes on! 

Is there some sort of the method (built-in functionality, macro, etc.) that I could use to swap each side of the expression such that the data is saved into the active record as opposed to read from it in order to perform a database insert? For example, after highlighting the above code and running the macro, it would become:

device.DeviceName = txtDeviceName.Text; device.Notes = txtNotes.Text; device.Hostname = txtHostName.Text; device.AssetTag = txtAssetTag.Text; device.SerialNumber = txtSerialNumber.Text; // snip again... 

Since the number of columns in the database that this active record encapsulates is rather large, it seems like most of this typing could be avoided with a simple automated process.

Obviously this wouldn’t work 100% because sometimes there would have to be type conversions (e.g. int to string) but for the most part I think this would save a lot of time.

Answer 1

Here is a macro that will do it:

Imports System Imports EnvDTE Imports EnvDTE80 Imports System.Diagnostics Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions  Public Module Helpers     Sub SwapAssignment()         If (Not IsNothing(DTE.ActiveDocument)) Then             Dim selection As TextSelection = CType(DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection, TextSelection)             selection.Text = Regex.Replace(selection.Text, '([^\s]*)\s*=\s*([^\s]*);', '$2 = $1;')         End If     End Sub End Module 

Basically it takes the selected text (either one line or as many lines as you select) and uses a regular expression to swap the values. Not pretty but then macros never are.