This sample shows the flexibility of Ookii.CommandLine's usage help generation. It uses a custom
UsageWriter, along with a custom LocalizedStringProvider, to completely transform the way
the usage help looks.
This sample also uses long/short parsing mode, but everything in it is applicable to default mode as well.
It uses the same arguments as the long/short mode sample, so see that for more details about each argument.
The usage help for this sample looks very different:
DESCRIPTION:
Sample command line application with highly customized usage help. The application parses the
command line and prints the results, but otherwise does nothing and none of the arguments are
actually used for anything.
USAGE:
CustomUsage [--source] <string> [--destination] <string> [arguments]
OPTIONS:
-c|--count <number> Provides the count for something to the application. [range: 0-100]
-d|--destination <string> The destination data.
-D|--date <date-time> Provides a date to the application.
--day <day-of-week> This is an argument using an enumeration type. Possible values:
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
-h|--help Displays this help message.
--operation-index <number> The operation's index. [default: 1]
-p|--process Does the processing.
-s|--source <string> The source data.
-v|--verbose Print verbose information; this is an example of a switch argument.
--value <string> This is an example of a multi-value argument, which can be repeated
multiple times to set more than one value.
--version Displays version information.
Customizing the usage help like this is not difficult, thanks to the UsageWriter class. The
sample derives a class from it, and overrides several methods to customize
the format. This allows it to change the parts it wants, and reuse the code for the parts that are
not different.
The sample also customizes the colors of the output, as shown in the below screenshot:
If you compare this with the usage output of the parser sample, which uses the default
output format, you can see just how much you can change by simply overriding some methods on the
UsageWriter class.