Customizing include-guard for Eclipse CDT

Question

I want an automatically generated include-guard by creating a new C++-class with Eclipse/CDT, but I don't find any way to change the ${include_guard_symbol} attribute.

My wish is an include-guard with a namespace prefix like following:

#ifndef NAMSPACE1_NAMESPACE2_HEADER_HPP

But if I use #ifndef ${namespace_name}_${include_guard_symbol} for this, it will produce:

namepace1::namespace2::_HEADER_HPP

How can I do this?

Answer 1

I'm using Eclipse Oxygen (CDT 9.3) and as Eelke described in their comment, there has been a UI setting for this for a while now.

However it only lets you choose from the preset schemes, no namespace or richer customisation options available yet.

Search for 'guard' in the preferences dialog, or navigate to C/C++ > Code Style > Name Style and select Code > Include Guard and then choose from the available guard schemes.

Answer 2

I had a dig around in the source for CDT, and found an undocumented preference setting you can use to change what is generated by ${include_guard_symbol}. There's no GUI for it either, but if you add the codetemplates.includeGuardGenerationScheme setting to <projectpath>/.settings/org.eclipse.cdt.ui.prefs, you can choose between file name (the default), file path or UUID.

Given the file <projectpath>/src/include/Class.h, the following values give these results:

• 0 gives an upper-case filename, i.e. CLASS_H_
• 1 gives a UUID, for example. HC9ABE718_D04E_411C_B5A2_F9FE1D9F9409
• 2 gives an upper-case file path, that is, SRC_INCLUDE_CLASS_H_

To avoid any doubt, here's the contents of our .settings/org.eclipse.cdt.ui.prefs:

codetemplates.includeGuardGenerationScheme=2
eclipse.preferences.version=1
formatter_settings_version=1

It's obviously not exactly what you're after, but we use 2 to give us an approximation of our namespaces since, generally speaking, our namespaces follow our folder structure.

The relevant code is in these files in the CDT source:

• core/org.eclipse.cdt.ui/src/org/eclipse/cdt/ui/PreferenceConstants.java for the constants for each option
• core/org.eclipse.cdt.ui/src/org/eclipse/cdt/internal/corext/codemanipulation/StubUtility.java for the generateIncludeGuardSymbol() method that does the work.

It would be really nice to see an extra option added for using the namespace, and a GUI too.