Visual Studio Post Build Event - Copy to Relative

Question

On a successful build, I wish to copy the contents of the output directory to a different location under the same "base" folder. This parent folder is a relative part and can vary based on Source Control settings.

I have listed a few of the Macro values available to me ...

$(SolutionDir) = D:\GlobalDir\Version\AppName\Solution1\build

$(ProjectDir) = D:\GlobalDir\Version\AppName\Solution1\Version\ProjectA\

I want to copy the Output Dir contents to the following folder :

D:\GlobalDir\Version\AppName\Solution2\Project\Dependency

The base location "D:\GlobalDir\Version\AppName" needs to be fetched from one of the above macros. However, none of the macro values list only the parent location.

How do I extract only the base location for the post build copy command ?

Answer 1

If none of the TargetDir or other macros point to the right place, use the ".." directory to go backwards up the folder hierarchy.

ie. Use $(SolutionDir)\..\.. to get your base directory.

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For list of all macros, see here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c02as0cs.aspx

Answer 2

You could try:

$(SolutionDir)..\..\

Answer 3

Would it not make sense to use msbuild directly? If you are doing this with every build, then you can add a msbuild task at the end? If you would just like to see if you can’t find another macro value that is not showed on the Visual Studio IDE, you could switch on the msbuild options to diagnostic and that will show you all of the variables that you could use, as well as their current value.

To switch this on in visual studio, go to Tools/Options then scroll down the tree view to the section called Projects and Solutions, expand that and click on Build and Run, at the right their is a drop down that specify the build output verbosity, setting that to diagnostic, will show you what other macro values you could use.

Because I don’t quite know to what level you would like to go, and how complex you want your build to be, this might give you some idea. I have recently been doing build scripts, that even execute SQL code as part of the build. If you would like some more help or even some sample build scripts, let me know, but if it is just a small process you want to run at the end of the build, the perhaps going the full msbuild script is a bit of over kill.

Hope it helps Rihan

Answer 4

I think this is related, but I had a problem when building directly using msbuild command line (from a batch file) vs building from within VS.

Using something like the following:

<PostBuildEvent>
  MOVE /Y "$(TargetDir)something.file1" "$(ProjectDir)something.file1"
  start XCOPY /Y /R "$(SolutionDir)SomeConsoleApp\bin\$(ConfigurationName)\*" "$(ProjectDir)App_Data\Consoles\SomeConsoleApp\"
</PostBuildEvent>

(note: start XCOPY rather than XCOPY used to get around a permissions issue which prevented copying)

The macro $(SolutionDir) evaluated to ..\ when executing msbuild from a batchfile, which resulted in the XCOPY command failing. It otherwise worked fine when built from within Visual Studio. Confirmed using /verbosity:diagnostic to see the evaluated output.

Using the macro $(ProjectDir)..\ instead, which amounts to the same thing, worked fine and retained the full path in both build scenarios.

Answer 5

Here is what you want to put in the project's Post-build event command line:

copy /Y "$(TargetDir)$(ProjectName).dll" "$(SolutionDir)lib\$(ProjectName).dll"

EDIT: Or if your target name is different than the Project Name.

copy /Y "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).dll" "$(SolutionDir)lib\$(TargetName).dll"