Projects outside of the OF folder broken in Windows 10 and Visual Studio when using addons

[c-mendoza]

The most recent version of Project Generator fails to create valid projects if the project has a local addon. PG also deletes all of the local addons from the addons.make file, presumably because it doesn't find them.

The previous behavior gave precedence to local addons, which is what makes the most sense.

[c-mendoza]

Rolling back to before 67e0b87 and running the old ProjectGenerator.exe fixes the issue, so it looks like the problem is in the updates to the PG submodule.

[ofTheo]

Ahh thanks @c-mendoza
pinging @2bbb @dimitre

[dimitre]

can you please test again using latest nightly @c-mendoza ? Thank you

[c-mendoza]

Sorry for the delay. Downloaded latest nightly and unfortunately generating any project that is outside of the "apps" folder creates a .sln that has errors and refuses to load. It looks like there is typo in the path to the OF project. This is the error when you open the .sln in VisualStudio:

C:\Users\xxx\Documents\developer\test_delete\test_delete.vcxproj : error  : The imported project "C:\Users\xxx\Documents\developer\of_v20230822_vs_releaselibs\openFrameworksCompiled\project\vs\openFrameworksDebug.props" was not found. 

The part of the path that says of_v20230822_vs_releaselibs should be of_v20230822_vs_release\libs.

A separate issue:
When generating a project that is inside the "apps" folder, if there are local addons, the source files for EVERY local addon show up in a single unnamed group in the VisualStudio project:

I did not try compiling, but it looked like VS was finding the headers for the addons, so at least those paths look like they work.

Sorry for the bad news!

[dimitre]

Hey @c-mendoza not bad news at all.
Thanks for testing.
This is my attempt to fix it openframeworks/projectGenerator#409
not sure if it will help with both the issues, the first one is ok from my tests, but I only looked at the files, not in windows right now.

[dimitre]

@c-mendoza now merged and it will be on tomorrow nightly

[c-mendoza]

I’ll test again tomorrow. Thanks!

…

On Aug 22, 2023, at 10:30 PM, Dimitre ***@***.***> wrote: @c-mendoza <https://github.com/c-mendoza> now merged and it will be on tomorrow nightly — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#7560 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AALC7AOZOL6YSXBYLJTJM5DXWVTKZANCNFSM6AAAAAAZNYFLKA>. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.

[dimitre]

Can you please test it again @c-mendoza? thank you

[c-mendoza]

Sorry, I've been slammed with work. Tested 0.12. Still broken. Still the same issue with the groups as above. Still fails to compile. I am getting a completely different error now:

1>------ Build started: Project: openframeworksLib, Configuration: Debug x64 ------
1>openframeworksLib.vcxproj -> C:\Users\xxx\Documents\developer\of_v0.12.0_vs_release\libs\openFrameworksCompiled\lib\vs\x64\openframeworksLib_debug.lib
2>------ Build started: Project: test_delete, Configuration: Debug x64 ------
2>C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\MSBuild\Microsoft\VC\v170\Microsoft.CppBuild.targets(1016,5): error MSB3191: Unable to create directory "C:\Users\xxx\Documents\developer\test_delete\obj\x64\Debug\Build\C:\Users\xxx\Documents\developer\of_v0.12.0_vs_release\addons\ofxPoco\src\Debug". The given path's format is not supported.
2>Done building project "test_delete.vcxproj" -- FAILED.
========== Build: 1 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

Looks like two paths are getting spliced together? There is a "C:" in the middle of the directory that MSVS is trying to create.

[dimitre]

Thank you @c-mendoza can you please share which addons you are using?

[ofTheo]

@c-mendoza were you trying to create an app at this location:
\Users\xxx\Documents\developer\test_delete\ or were you trying to create an app inside the apps/myApps folder?

[c-mendoza]

I am using ofxImGui and ofxImGuiUtils, but I think that is probably not relevant to the problem.

The project is in \Users\xxx\Documents\developer\test_delete\.

When the project is in OF_DIRECTORY\apps\myApps\test_delete it compiles, but the local_addons group still does not have subgroups for each addon, so all of the files show up in the same unnamed subgroup, as pictured previously.

[ofTheo]

Okay I can recreate this issue @c-mendoza

The issue is a result of the temporary files ( object files ) needing to be in sub-folders in the build/ folder due to there being multiple files with the same name.

We are using the relative path to essentially create a unique location for each file. But when you make a project outside of the OF folder it uses an absolute path which then creates a path for the build file which can't be created.

So in your case RelativeDir is: C:\Users\xxx\Documents\developer\of_v0.12.0_vs_release\addons\ofxPoco\src\Debug which is not allowed.

So the TLDR is that right now Windows VS won't support projects outside of the OF folder.

I think we could fix this to maybe use a file hash or some other approach to create a unique build file that doesn't rely on the directory location.