[Cmake] Problem with more than one group of source files in a Visual Studio project, and a workaround

[William A. Hoffman]

The SOURCE_GROUP command option FILE was not really implemented
in 1.6.7.  It was not in the documentation, and should not have even been
in the source.  It has been implemented in CVS this past week.  With the
current cvs CMake the only way to do it is with the regular expression.


SOURCE_GROUP(name regex) Defines a new source group. Any file whose name 
matches the regular expression will be placed in this group. The LAST 
regular expression of all defined SOURCE_GROUPs that matches the file will 
be selected.

You can write some cmake code to convert a list of files into a regular 
expression
for the list. You can do something like this:

# List the sources and add them to a target normally.
SET(SRCS a.c b.c)
ADD_EXECUTABLE(test1 ${SRCS} c.c)
# Construct a regular expression that will match the exact sources
# previously listed.
STRING(REGEX REPLACE ";" "|" SRCS_REGEX "${SRCS}")
STRING(REGEX REPLACE "\\." "\\\\." SRCS_REGEX "${SRCS_REGEX}")
# Use the regular expression to add the source group.
SOURCE_GROUP("My Files" "(${SRCS_REGEX})$")
This will result in a project with "c.c" in the "Source Files" group
and "a.c" and "b.c" in the "My Files" group.


The FILES part of SOURCE_GROUP will be implemented in the next release.

-Bill

At 06:44 PM 7/25/2003 -0400, Karr, David wrote:
>OK, I'm still trying to convert an existing Visual Studio
>workspace over to CMake.  I've modified my architecture
>to buy into the existing ideas of CMake as much as I can
>(and as far as I know), and I'm using an umodified copy
>of CMake 1.6.7 to try to generate my projects.
>
>In some of the projects in the existing Visual Studio
>workspace, the developers had decided to divide the
>source files into multiple disjoint source groups.
>For example, a project might look like this when its
>groups are expanded in the Visual Studio window:
>
>   MyProject files
>    |-- Alpha Source Files
>    | |-- file_a1.cpp
>    | |-- file_a2.cpp
>    |-- Beta Source Files
>    | |-- file_b1.cpp
>    | |-- file_b1.cpp
>
>There were good reasons for doing this in at least
>some of the cases, and it would be difficult to "sell"
>one-source-group-per-project to all the developers.
>
>Unfortunately, in my first attempt to replicate this
>project structure with CMake, in addition to using the
>SOURCE_GROUP(var FILES ...) command to make the source
>groups, I also passed the source file names to the
>ADD_EXECUTABLE(MyProject ...) command.
>I then got an extra copy of each of the .cpp
>files under this project, either in a "Source Files"
>source group or, if I overrode the regular expression of
>"Source Files" so that it doesn't match .cpp, I got all
>these files at the same level as CMakeLists.txt.  Either
>way, when I tried to build the project in Visual Studio, it
>produced an error message claiming that two files (it gave
>their full paths, which happen to be identical) were both
>configured to produce the same output.
>
>I think the reason for this is that the local generator for
>Visual Studio 6 runs through the source files to add them to
>the correct source groups if they aren't already there, and
>when it does so it looks specifically to match a regular
>expression; the cmSourceGroup::Match(...) function doesn't
>tell you when the file happens to have been added to the
>group by SOURCE_GROUP(var FILES ...).  Ergo the file is
>added to a source group again (I've even seen it show up
>twice in the same group while looking for a workaround)
>and Visual Studio is apparently fooled into thinking there
>are two copies of it.
>
>I made sure that I used the full paths in the filenames I
>added to source groups, but it didn't seem to help.
>
>
>I attempted to work around this by not declaring any sources
>for the build, that is, I'd do something like this:
>
>   ADD_LIBRARY(my_library SHARED "")
>
>But CMake doesn't allow this.  So my workaround was to
>declare a dummy source file in the ADD_EXECUTABLE or
>ADD_LIBRARY command, for example,
>
>   ADD_LIBRARY(my_library SHARED "README.txt")
>
>It doesn't seem to matter what the dummy file is as long as
>it actually exists and isn't considered a source file by
>Visual Studio (but honestly, I tried a .txt file, it worked,
>so I didn't look any further).
>
>
>I'm sure this is possible to fix in the CMake source but it
>was easier to just work around it for now.  The obvious fix
>seems to be a more careful search of existing source groups
>while generating the .dsp files, so that CMake never
>automatically duplicates any filename that's already in
>some source group.  But I came up with this via a novice
>understanding of how the internals of CMake work, so there
>may be a better way.
>
>
>-- David A. Karr
>
>
>
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