Is there a workaround that I can use so that I can test the build type when using CMake in combination with Visual Studio and multiple configurations? - cmake

Question

I would like to work with 'Debug', 'Release', 'Debug_Unicode' and 'Release_Unicode'
I have been able to use the DEBUG_CONFIGURATIONS variable so that the 'Debug Unicode' configuration correctly gets used as debug
This is what I tried to do in the CmakeLists.txt file:
target_link_libraries(tests
optimized ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/src/${CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE}/foo.lib
debug ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/src/${CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE}/foo.lib
)
Clearly CMake is able to make a choice between debug and release at this point, as it has to choose the 'optimized' or 'debug' library.
However, CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE is an empty string.
The best that I have been able to come up with is to work with a separate solution file for each of the configurations,
passing in CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE myself:
cmake -G Visual Studio 11 2012 Win64 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug_Unicode C:\foo

Answer 1

As Antonio was mentioning
target_link_libraries(tests foo)
or just
add_dependencies(tests foo)
would be sufficient to link the correct library from the same configuration.
If you want to do more advanced stuff, take a look at the generator expressions. They are configuration sensitive incl. in Visual Studio's multi-configuration environment and they would work also for the target_link_libraries() command.
So your example would look like:
target_link_libraries(tests ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/src/$<CONFIG>/foo.lib)
I have used generator expression e.g. in custom commands that need to be aware of the output path of my DLL (if foo would be generating an MSTest DLL):
add_test(
NAME RunFooTest
WORKING_DIRECTORY $<TARGET_FILE_DIR:foo>
COMMAND vstest.console.exe /InIsolation /Platform:x86 $<TARGET_FILE:$foo>
)
And - just because you mentioned different solutions - you can use CMake to build a certain configuration from the command line. This would in your case look like e.g.
cmake --build C:\foo --target ALL_BUILD --config Debug_Unicode