How do I tell a Dojo custom build about external libraries? - dojo

Question

In my Dojo build, I'm pulling in some third party libraries.
As I go through the build process, I'm getting errors due to ReferenceErrors.
This is fine. This makes sense.
However, I'd like to tell the Dojo build process about the things that are being referenced. In essence, this would be akin to passing externs to the Closure Compliler.
Thus, my question: How do I tell the Dojo build process about references that it cannot infer from my code base?
This is using Dojo 1.8

Answer 1

I just ran into this myself. Now I'm assuming that the ReferenceErrors you referred to are for browser objects like navigator, window, document, and the like. If so, then this is a problem introduced by the Dojo build process itself, because the build is performed by dojo.js running inside of Rhino where browser global objects are not defined. It's a dojo/Rhino error, not a closure compiler error, so there's nothing you can pass to closure to change this. For example, a script like
(function(){
window.alert("hello");
})();
will break your dojo build if it is included in a dojo layer. When the dojo AMD loader resolves the dependency of a script like the above, it will run the body of the function, resulting in a ReferenceError because window does not exist in Rhino.
To get around this, wrap the script as an AMD module
define([], function(){
window.alert("hello");
});
and then the function body will NOT be executed by the AMD loader during dojo build.