I'm trying to package a few files into a NuGet package, but the issue is that all of the files are sent to the "content" folder within the NuGet package by default when packaged. Normally this is okay, but for the JSON files I have in "ABCJsons" I'd like them to be sent to "content/NewFolderName".
In my example below, the first block is my AbcToolTester, which has all of its project files files being successfully sent to the content directory in the NuGet package. The second block, is where I attempted to copy all the json files with ABCLibrary (ABCLibrary has subfolders where the actual Jsons are located) to the destination folder "ABCJsons". I thought this would do the trick, but unfortunately the ABCJson files just get sent to the content folder along with all the other files.
<ItemGroup>
<Content Include="..\AbcToolTester\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\**" Exclude="..\AbcToolTester\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\*.pdb">
<IncludeInPackage>true</IncludeInPackage>
<CopyToOutputDirectory>Always</CopyToOutputDirectory>
</Content>
<ItemGroup>
<Target Name="CopyABCLibrary" AfterTargets="AfterBuild">
<ItemGroup>
<ABCJsonsInclude="..\..\tests\ABCLibrary\**\*.*"/>
</ItemGroup>
<Copy SourceFiles="#(ABCJsons)" DestinationFolder="$(TargetDir)\ABCJsons" SkipUnchangedFiles="true" />
</Target>
It's hard to tell if the NuGet package you are creating is actually dependent on AbcToolTester project because there are easier ways to package that. That's another question though.
For your actual issue, you can simplify the copying process while also telling it where to pack the files. Replace your CopyABCLibrary target with this:
<ItemGroup>
<Content Include="..\..\tests\ABCLibrary\**\*.*">
<CopyToOutputDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToOutputDirectory>
<Pack>true</Pack>
<PackagePath>ABCJsons\%(RecursiveDir)</PackagePath>
<!-- This line hides the items from showing in the solution explorer -->
<Visible>false</Visible>
</Content>
</ItemGroup>
This will put all those files into the root of the nuget package into the ABCJsons folder and preserve the directory structure. Change the path accordingly to put it somewhere else.
Related
I want to add some files recursively to a single project that are located in folders inside my solution root.
Right now, I found a working solution to add those files by specifying each folder manually:
<ItemGroup>
<Content Include="..\Folder1\**\*">
<Link>Folder1\%(RecursiveDir)\%(Filename)%(Extension)</Link>
</Content>
<Content Include="..\Folder2\**\*">
<Link>Folder2\%(RecursiveDir)\%(Filename)%(Extension)</Link>
</Content>
<Content Include="..\Folder3\**\*">
<Link>Folder3\%(RecursiveDir)\%(Filename)%(Extension)</Link>
</Content>
</ItemGroup>
As those can be a handfull folders and they can be different depending on my solution, I want to have an easy list to define the folder names.
Something like this:
<PropertyGroup>
<DefinedResourceFolders>Folder1;Folder2;Folder3</DefinedResourceFolders>
</PropertyGroup>
This would also allow me to input this as a property directly when calling msbuild to extend the files that are going to the build output, maybe.
I tried to look into the MSBuild Batching documentation and several other online sources, but I could not figure it out. Most batching examples I found were working with Targets, not Includes into the solution items.
Is this possible? How would I define the <ItemGroup> for the content then?
P.S.: I don't care about wildcard issues with .csproj files when new files are added, etc. This will either be a single "Resources" project only containing those displayed files, or I am using my external .props file that I am importing into each .csproj file anyway.
Suppose you want to include all files in folders root/Folder1, root/Folder2 and root/Folder3 recursively.
This is how the builds (both VS and CLI) do what you want. However, VS will not show the files as part of the project.
<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk" InitialTargets="__AddBatchedContent;$(InitialTargets)">
<!-- the usual properties -->
<!-- You could of course define the folder array directly in an Item,
but this is what you wanted :-) -->
<PropertyGroup>
<Lookups>Folder1;Folder2;Folder3</Lookups>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<LookupDir Include="$(Lookups)" />
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="__AddBatchedContent">
<ItemGroup>
<!-- save the original source folder of the globbed file name in custom
metadata "Folder" so we can use it later as its output base folder -->
<__BatchedFiles Include="..\%(LookupDir.Identity)\**\*" Folder="%(LookupDir.Identity)" />
<Content Include="#(__BatchedFiles)" Link="%(Folder)\%(RecursiveDir)\%(Filename)%(Extension)" CopyToOutputDirectory="Always" />
</ItemGroup>
</Target>
</Project>
Note that if you want to put this in a .targets file to use this technique in multiple projects, you should replace the ..\ with $(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)..\ so that the path is relative to the (known) location of the .targets file instead of the (unknown) location of the importing project.
Thanks to #Ilya Kozhevnikov for the basis of this answer.
You are not the only one who would like this to be simpler :-): https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/issues/3274
I have a nuget with a .targets file that tells the consuming project to copy all files within a "Dependencies" folder to the output directory.
<ItemGroup>
<Files Include="$(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)/../contentFiles/Dependencies/*.*" />
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="CopyDependencies" AfterTargets="Build">
<Copy SourceFiles="#(Files)"
DestinationFolder="$(TargetDir)" />
</Target>
This nuget is consumed by two projects: Project A and Project B. For this question, let's say we have a System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation.dll that is one of the dependencies within this nuget. The output directory of Project A does not already have System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation.dll, so it gets copied to the output directory when the project is built. Project B however already contains System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation.dll in the output directory. This causes a runtime issue at startup since the targets file is trying to overwrite the existing DLL of the same name with the System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation.dll file from within the nuget (which is a dependency of other files within the output directory).
So, how can I adjust my .targets file to only copy in files that do not already exist within the output directory based on name, and not size or date modified?
There are several ways but probably the most succinct change to your example code would be the following:
<ItemGroup>
<Files Include="$(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)/../contentFiles/Dependencies/*.*" />
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="CopyDependencies" AfterTargets="Build">
<Copy SourceFiles="#(Files)" DestinationFolder="$(TargetDir)" Condition="!Exists('$(TargetDir)/%(Filename)%(Extension)')" />
</Target>
The change is adding a Condition on the Copy that is using the metadata of the #(Files) collection to test that the file does not exist in $(TargetDir).
Because of the use of metadata, the Copy is a task batch. Essentially the #(Files) collection is divided into batches by %(Filename)%(Extension) and there is a separate Copy task invoked for each batch.
If there is a large number of files in the Dependencies folder, the following variant may provide better performance.
<ItemGroup>
<Files Include="$(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)/../contentFiles/Dependencies/*.*" />
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="CopyDependencies" AfterTargets="Build">
<ItemGroup>
<FilesToCopy Include="#(Files)" Condition="!Exists('$(TargetDir)/%(Filename)%(Extension)')" />
</ItemGroup>
<Copy SourceFiles="#(FilesToCopy)" DestinationFolder="$(TargetDir)" />
</Target>
The task batching is moved to the definition of a new ItemGroup collection and the Copy task is invoked once for the set of files. The potential performance improvement is that the implementation of the Copy task tries to parallelize copies, which it can't do when invoked per file.
I have a shared.{Environment}.json file that is added as linked files in several .Net core 2.1 projects. When project is build or published file gets copied to output directory, in case of release its fine but on debug it doesn't work as when project run it looks up for that file in project directory not in output directory.
Whats the proper way to solve this issue for both debug and publish?
For linked files, it will not exist under the project directory.
For a workaround, you could try to copy the file with task in csproj like below:
<ItemGroup>
<Content Include="..\MVCPro\shared.{Environment}.json">
<Link>shared.{Environment}.json</Link>
<CopyToOutputDirectory>Always</CopyToOutputDirectory>
</Content>
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="CopyLinkedContentFiles" BeforeTargets="Build">
<Copy SourceFiles="..\MVCPro\shared.{Environment}.json" DestinationFolder=".\" SkipUnchangedFiles="true" OverwriteReadOnlyFiles="true" />
</Target>
I want to include files from the solution directory, regardless of where the files are. I added this to my .csproj file:
<ItemGroup>
<Content Include="$(SolutionDir)\web\**\*" />
</ItemGroup>
But the files do not appear in the solution explorer. And they do not appear in the publish output either.
How to do this correctly?
You still need to tell MSBuild to copy the content, for example
<ItemGroup>
<Content Include="$(SolutionDir)\web\**\*">
<CopyToOutputDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToOutputDirectory>
</Content>
</ItemGroup>
I'm unable to get my project to load if an included Nuget package includes files that exist in my project.
My Nuget package contains a appsettings.json file, and since my project also has an appsettings.json file, I get the following error in Visual Studio 2017:
(load failed) - Duplicated linked item found in the project: "C:\users\user\.nuget\packages\mypackage\contentFiles\any\netcoreapp1.1\appsettings.json"
If I remove the appsettings file from my project (not the Nuget package), the project loads fine, but the file is needed for the project to work.
I can't seem to remove the appsettings file from the nuget package, but this might be my only option.
'dotnet pack' seems to include this file even though my csproj file is not referencing it in the "CopyToPublishDirectory"
So the question is:
How to exclude certain files from being packaged (via dotnet pack)?
Or how to load a project where duplicated linked items exist?
My set up is different from yours, but I got a similar error message when trying to add an existing project to a solution. I tried a few things, so not sure what exactly helped solved it in the end, but here's what I did:
Cleaned the folder in which the project was located by deleting bin and obj folders
Noticed that in the csproj file of the failing to load project there were a couple of PropertyGroup and Item nodes that were not used or were empty or pointing to folders that were not on the disk anymore, so I removed those nodes.
After that I removed and re-added the project to the solution and it loaded successfully.
I managed to get it to work.
By default all content files are packaged.
To disable this I edited the csproj file as follows:
<PropertyGroup>
<EnableDefaultContentItems>false</EnableDefaultContentItems>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<Content Include="appsettings.*">
<Pack>false</Pack>
</Content>
<ItemGroup>
This seems to be happening (among possibly other things) in projects which reference another project where there's a shared reference between the two.
For example:
Parent project [references package/dll X]
|
*-> Child, failing project [also explicitly references package/dll X]
In my case removing the X reference from the failed project helped solve the problem.
Had a similar issue, originally, clone to a new location fixed it. After it came bay I noticed in the csproj file
<ItemGroup>
<Folder Include="Helpers\" />
<Folder Include="Styles\" />
<Folder Include="Services\Interfaces\" />
<Folder Include="Controls\" />
<Folder Include="Styles\Fonts\" />
<Folder Include="ViewModels\Base\" />
<Folder Include="ViewModels\Product" />
<Folder Include="ViewModels\Invoice\" />
<Folder Include="ViewModels\Product\" />
<Folder Include="Views\Product\Popup\" />
</ItemGroup>
ViewModels\Product was referenced twice.