[CMake] Specify extra files for display in IDE

[Daniel Eiband]

Hi,

I'm currently migrating a code base from a proprietary MSBuild based generator to CMake 3.11 which is shipped with Visual Studio. There are two aspects to this task:

1) Integration of custom build steps
2) Presentation in the IDE

The first aspect of integrating all of our custom build steps as custom commands works really well. At one point I use an object library to be able to use the object files as input to such a custom tool and to link a shared library. Both the object library and the shared library are from the programmers perspective one logical unit. The object library is just an implementation detail. However, as for the second point, the source files are displayed with the object library target in the IDE while the shared library has no sources. This makes sense from the build targets point of view, but surprises the developers.
My approach is to hide all targets which are sort of implementation detail into a folder.  To make this work I would like to display the sources with the shared library which consumes the object files of the object library. Currently this seems to be impossible.

Another inconsistency I noticed regarding the second point is the following: I implemented header only libraries as interface libraries in CMake. This works fine from the build perspective. Interface libraries however don't allow me to list sources, not even headers. As a result, the headers of this header only library are not displayed anywhere in the IDE. This is odd, because in executable targets for example I can list all headers even if they don't contribute to the build process directly and they are displayed in the IDE. Using empty custom targets to present the header files works, but they are not displayed as C++ libraries in Visual Studio any longer. This also litters the solution with lots of extra empty targets.

I'm going to rephrase both described presentation problems into one more fundamental question, solutions or workarounds for either of both presentation problems are of course welcome: Can I specify sources used for builds and files used for display in IDEs separately? I think they are two different things. For my use case it would also be sufficient to be able to add extra files for display in IDEs to any target.

Regards,
Daniel
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