Is it possible to open a namespace provided by a Type Provider?

Question

Is there any way to open a namespace of types provided by a type provider implementation? I ask, because some of the generated type name paths are very long and ugly in code. I have used type abbreviations to alleviate this, but obviously this is a manual process. The F# open keyword does not support this. Is there another way? Update: as pointed out in the answer and comments this is wrong. You can open a type provided namespace. I had not realised I was looking at deeply nested types, not a namespace.

Answer 1

This is tricky - parameterized type providers (like the standard SQL providers or the F# Data providers for XML and JSON) need to put all types that they generate (representing tables, XML nodes, etc) inside the main generated type. So all types that you might want to use are hidden somewhere as nested types of the main type (with parameters specified).

This makes sense - if you use the type provider with multiple parameters, the types generated for each configuration have to be separate.

As @kvb points out, you cannot open a nested type, but you can use type aliases to make this a bit less painful. For example, using F# Data, I can define an alias R that lets me access all the generated domain types with just two additional characters:

#r @"..\packages\FSharp.Data.1.1.10\lib\net40\FSharp.Data.dll"
open FSharp.Data

type RssFeed = XmlProvider<"http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml">
type R = RssFeed.DomainTypes

let printTitle (itm:R.Item) = printfn "%A" itm.Title