Chenile Gen Getting Started

This guide is for application developers who want to use Chenile and Chenile Gen to create services from standard blueprints instead of hand-building every module from scratch.

What Chenile Gen Is

Chenile Gen lives in the neighboring chenile-gen repository. Its jgen tool generates Chenile application skeletons from blueprint plugins.

At a high level:

1. choose a blueprint
2. provide input values
3. Chenile Gen copies a template tree
4. it fills in names, packages, options, and conditional modules
5. the generated project compiles against the standard Chenile runtime libraries

Main blueprints

The built-in blueprints include:

• chenile-service
• wfservice
• wfcustom
• mybatisQuery
• chenile-interceptor
• it
• batch
• minimonolith
• jgen-blueprint

For blueprint-based Chenile application generation, the most important ones are:

• chenile-service
• wfservice
• wfcustom
• mybatisQuery
• minimonolith

How the generated code uses Chenile

Examples:

• mybatisQuery generates a project that depends on org.chenile:chenile-query-controller
• wfservice and wfcustom generate projects that depend on workflow-api and workflow-service
• generated workflow builds also use stm-generate-puml for workflow diagrams

Prerequisites

Before using Chenile Gen, make sure you have:

• Java installed
• Maven installed
• a shell environment such as zsh, bash, or PowerShell

If you are building Chenile Gen from source:

cd ~/Documents/framework/chenile-gen
make all
source setpath.sh

The CLI entry point

chenile-gen/jgen/jgen-cli/bin/jgen.sh

Two ways to generate

Interactive mode

chenile-gen/jgen/jgen-cli/bin/jgen.sh

This starts a menu-driven prompt flow.

Input-file mode

This is the safer and more repeatable mode.

Generate a sample input file:

chenile-gen/jgen/jgen-cli/bin/jgen.sh -g wfservice -o wfservice-input.json

Then run generation:

chenile-gen/jgen/jgen-cli/bin/jgen.sh -f wfservice-input.json

Recommended workflow

1. Choose the right blueprint.
2. Generate a sample input file with -g.
3. Edit the JSON file.
4. Run generation with -f.
5. Inspect the generated project.
6. Build it with:

mvn install

Blueprint selection guide

chenile-service

Use this for a general Chenile service.

wfservice

Use this when the domain entity moves through states and events and you want a generated workflow-enabled service.

wfcustom

Use this when you already have workflow XML and want generation to derive wiring and support code from it.

mybatisQuery

Use this when you need query endpoints backed by metadata JSON and MyBatis XML.

minimonolith

Use this when you want one bootable package that hosts multiple Chenile service modules and you want optional MCP, service-registry, query-controller, or H2-console support without immediately hand-editing the generated templates.

Important minimonolith options now include:

• enableMCP
• mcpServerName
• mcpInstructions
• enableServiceRegistry
• enableServiceRegistryDelegate
• serviceRegistryUrl
• enableQueryController
• enableH2Console
• dependencies

enableServiceRegistry hosts service-registry-service inside the generated monolith. enableServiceRegistryDelegate instead adds service-registry-delegate and expects serviceRegistryUrl so the generated application.yml can point to a remote registry.

Structured input maps and record arrays

jgen now supports structured array inputs through RECORD_ARRAY. This is used in minimonolith for extra Maven dependencies.

Example:

{
  "blueprint": "minimonolith",
  "monolith": "agent",
  "dependencies": [
    {
      "dependencyName": "service-registry-delegate",
      "dependencyGroup": "org.chenile",
      "dependencyVersion": "2.1.21"
    },
    {
      "dependencyName": "chenile-query-controller",
      "dependencyGroup": "org.chenile"
    }
  ]
}

The generated package pom.xml iterates over these records and emits Maven <dependency> entries.

For the built-in dependencies field:

• dependencyName is the anchor field
• dependencyGroup and dependencyVersion are not accepted if dependencyName is blank
• dependencyVersion is optional when dependencyName is present

jgen also now resolves ${...} placeholders against earlier captured input values, so defaults such as ${monolith} work in interactive and input-file mode.

Generate a sample minimonolith input file with:

chenile-gen/jgen/jgen-cli/bin/jgen.sh -g minimonolith -o minimonolith-input.json