Managing dependencies between projects

In this tutorial, you will learn how to manage dependencies between projects.

Requirements

We will assume you have a properly configured qiBuild worktree, and that you have managed to compile a basic project.

Overview

We are going to create two separate projects: hello and world, where hello depends on the compiled library found in world.

The world project contains sources to build a dynamic library (libworld.so or world.dll)

The hello project contains source to build an executable named hello which depends on the world library.

It also contains a small test that simply tries to launch hello.

The sources of this example can be found here: helloworld.zip

Extract the archive in your qiBuild worktree, you should end up with something looking like:

.qi
|__ qibuild.xml
world
|__ qiproject.xml
|__ CMakeLists.txt
|__ world
    |__ world.hpp
    |__ world.cpp
hello
|__ qiproject.xml
|__ CMakeLists.txt
|__ main.cpp

qiBuild in action

Configuring and building the hello project is as easy as

$ qibuild configure hello
$ qibuild make hello
$ qibuild test hello

For this to work, you only have to write two qiproject.xml files

The first one in QI_WORK_TREE/world/qiproject.xml simply tells qibuild that there is a project named world in QI_WORK_TREE/world

<project version="3">
  <qibuild name="world" />
</project>

The second one in QI_WORK_TREE/hello tells qibuild there is a project named hello in QI_WORK_TREE/hello, and that it depends on the world project:

<project version="3" >
  <qibuild name="hello">
    <depends buildtime="true" runtime="true" names="world" />
  </qibuild>
</project>

You can see that configuring hello caused the world project to be configured too, and that building hello also built the world project.

On Windows, the world DLL was copied right next to hello.exe, so running qibuild test hello just worked.

If you are using Visual Studio, you can open hello.sln in QI_WORK_TREE/hello/build-.../hello.sln, select “hello” as startup project, and start debugging hello_d.exe right away.

Warning

If you try to compile hello in release, you’ll get an error because “world” has not been compiled in release, so world.lib could not found.

Simply run

$ qibuild configure --release world
$ qibuild make --release world

And try again.

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