dfx generate is not compiling the candid if the canister is not deployed

[ozwaldorf]

Currently, if you have a child canister that is in the project, but does not get deployed directly by dfx and rather a parent canister, you cannot generate the bindings. The generation only works after creating the canister id. A usual workaround is specifying the management or anonymous principal id in canister_ids.json, but as generate only reads the local ids and they are always ephemeral, it requires manual intervention any time dfx is reset.

I suggest removing the canister id requirements for dfx generate, and only rely on the candid file existing

[sesi200]

Part of SDK-693

[ByronBecker]

@sesi200 Can this be added as a feature request? (To discussions)

[sesi200]

Of course! I thought it wasn't necessary to convert but now that I didn't get around to do it yet it makes sense to enable the upvoting on the issue

[paulyoung]

Can you use didc bind hello.did -t js as a workaround in the meantime?

[sesi200]

This will be partially resolved in #2988

[sesi200]

This will be fully resolved in #3093