Generator plugin is unable to find NUnit.

[Dubai-Takodachi]

Hi all!

Currently iam working on some plugins. One of them is a generator plugin for making a custom NUnit Attribute.

I followed the steps from https://docs.reqnroll.net/latest/extend/plugins.html#generator-plugins but when i try to dotnet build the test project i get the following error:
Generation error: Message: Could not load file or assembly 'nunit.framework, Version=4.4.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=2638cd05610744eb'. The system cannot find the file specified.

Nunit is referenced in in the bin folder of both the Test-Project aswell as the Library. Both have the same version.

My setup is the following:

I have a Solution containing 3 Projects:
The Testproject,
the NUnitAttribute Library
and the GeneratorPlugin

The Generator Plugin has a reference to the NUnitAttribute project and the test project has a reference of the GeneratorPlugin project with the ReqnrollGeneratorPlugins pointed at the dll in the bin folder of the GeneratorPlugin project.
Using the Visual studio build works. But using the 'dotnet build' command does not work.

In the documentation it states: "If your plugin uses third party assemblies, you need to make sure that the dependencies can be found." and i think this is probably the problem case but all 3 cases are valid for my project ( or atleast i think so)

If something is not clear please ask!
Any help is welcome!

[gasparnagy]

The generator plugins run during the build process at a time when the runtime dependencies might not be available. Therefore the easiest approach is if your generator plugin does not depend on NUnit, just adds the necessary attributes as strings, like we do in the core nunit generator: https://github.com/reqnroll/Reqnroll/blob/main/Reqnroll.Generator/UnitTestProvider/NUnit3TestGeneratorProvider.cs#L13

You can have dependencies (even to nunit.framework), but then you should make sure that the related assemblies are packaged into your plugin. For example the ExternalDataPlugin depends on ExcelDataReader and therefore that assembly is in the build\netstandard2.0\ folder of the package.